The body knows before you do
On the quiet strangeness of a changing season
Something is different this week, and I cannot tell you exactly what it is.
Not wrong. Not dramatic. Just different, in the way April is always slightly different from March, even when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
Something in the quality of the light.
Something in the way I stood at the window with my coffee this morning, longer than usual. Not thinking about anything. Just standing there. Watching the sun hit the shelf. Feeling the warmth of the mug in both hands.
Not ready to move yet.
My body does this now. It pauses before I do.
I have been in perimenopause long enough to know that my body has its own knowing, and it does not send a warning first.
It just shows up.
A morning where everything feels slightly thicker than usual.
A tiredness that has nothing to do with how long I was in bed.
I used to fight this. I used to treat my body like a problem that good habits could solve, if I could just find the right mix.
More water. Earlier bedtime. One more pill from one more article.
I am done with that.
What I do instead is quieter, and I think, more useful.
I pay attention.
Not in a tracking way. Not in a logging-it-into-an-app way.
Just the plain, animal attention of noticing what is happening inside this body, on this morning, in this April.
This week, it is asking me to slow down.
Not because anything is wrong.
Because something is shifting, and that shifting takes energy I cannot see.
So much of perimenopause is like this.
Invisible.
Not just to the people around us, who mostly have no idea what is happening unless we tell them. Invisible to us.
The changes build slowly.
Quietly.
Until one morning you are standing at a window, wondering when you started needing stillness the way you used to need coffee.
That is not a complaint.
It is just what I am noticing.
The pothos on my shelf has been doing something similar.
Three new leaves in the past two weeks, after months of what looked like nothing at all. No new growth.
Nothing I could point to. I checked the soil.
Moved it closer to the light, then back again.
I almost gave up on it.
Not in a throwing-it-away sense.
More in a quiet, resigned way.
Maybe this is just what it does now.
Then one morning, a tiny curled leaf I hadn’t seen.
Pale green, almost white, tucked against the stem.
Then another.
Then a third, reaching toward the window like it had been planning this the whole time.
It was growing. It just wasn’t showing me yet.
I think about that when my body is doing something I cannot see or name. When the only evidence is a feeling I can’t quite place, or a shift I can’t prove to anyone.
The roots are probably fine.
The work is probably happening.
The not-seeing is not the same as the not-growing.
This week, I am paying attention to one thing: what my body asks for before my mind has a chance to argue with it.
Not what I think I should want. What I actually reach for.
This morning it was the grow light instead of the overhead. No reason except that it felt better. I didn't ask why. I just turned it on and let the room get soft around me.
That was enough.
That is the practice. Not adding anything. Just noticing what already wants to be true.
I’ll be here next Friday. Same time, same quiet.
Come sit with me,
Tew Green
In The Pause Life
Transition·Tend·Strengthen·Savor·Become