# 3 What’s the Plan for Today?

This morning, my husband asked me my plan for today.

My reply: I have no idea.

It’s been a long time since I made plans for a day. Instead, I have hopes. Today, I hoped to do some grocery shopping and cooking, tidy up the kitchen, and plant the impatiens I bought yesterday. I truly thought it was a realistic list.

I was out of bed just before ten, had a cup of tea, blended my breakfast protein smoothie, and talked for a while on the phone with my sister and my mom. After I hung up, I thought a brief lie-down would be a good idea. Pacing is so important when you have fatigue. If you take the breaks you need, you can last longer.

I laid down at 11:30 a.m. thinking I’d need just twenty minutes of rest, but I fell asleep. When I woke, I was the opposite of refreshed and ready to go. Fatigue lay on top of me like fathoms of water. I turned just my head to look at the clock and felt the slump of disappointment that is so familiar these days. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

I thought about the grocery store and the cooking and the kitchen and the impatiens. I kept thinking about them while I laid in bed, under the weight of an ocean, until about five o’clock when thirst and hunger pushed me down the stairs. I thought about them again when I’d had something to drink and eat. I could still get to the store. I could still plant flowers. Plenty of daylight left. But my arms and legs were weak strangers to me. They carried me up the stairs back to my bed, and that’s where I have remained.

Discouragement is the constant companion to chronic fatigue. It can pull you under and anchor you to depths you hadn’t known existed.

As much as I can, on days like today, I surface toward encouragements. In Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambala, 1997), she writes, “We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know” (9).

I want to label the disassembling of today’s hope list bad. Negative. Disappointing. HopeLESS. Seems to me that it is all of those things. But Chodron may be right. I possibly don’t know anything. I possibly don’t know that there is some purpose to illness, some undiscovered sea creature of energy in the drowning of fatigue. So I don’t plan. I hope.

Hoping seems more in keeping with not knowing than planning does. So tomorrow, I’ll have a new hope list.

Julie

Photo by Julie Blake Edison on Unsplash