So much for relaxing
Sep. 30th, 2007 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amanda_loddenIn my quest for maintenance, one of the things I am attempting to maintain better is myself. I have a daily checklist of items I don't do but ought to. I don't get through it all every day yet (it's not long, just full of things that aren't habits yet), but I'm trying.
One of the things on it is to relax before bed, in an effort to sleep better. Since I don't actually know how to meditate, I simply stretch for about 10 minutes and then try to sit quietly and breath deeply for another 10 minutes.
And then I end up thinking about Thomas Lannom, which pretty much kills any hope of quieting my mind.
Mr. Lannom was my seventh-grade social studies teacher. He had a slightly caustic attitude with a tendency to pick on people in a friendly-yet-sarcastic way. That also describes about 90% of my friends, so of course Mr. Lannom was one of my favorite teachers. I picked on him right back, too. I'd like to say that I was as gentle and careful about not hitting people's sore spots as he was, but I was twelve so I'm sure I lacked any finesse whatsoever. Still, he never seemed to hold it against me, and once in a while when things were going poorly, I'd talk to him about the trials and tribulations of Being Twelve. He never picked on me during those conversations, nor did I pick on him.
One day one of my fellow students fell asleep in class. Mr. Lannom woke him up in a not-so-gentle way (I can't recall if he threw something or dropped a heavy book; he'd been known to do both), and when the student used the excuse of not being able to get to sleep the night before, Mr. Lannom suggested a technique to help-- breathing in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth, and concentrating on your breath. I have no idea if it worked for the other sleepy student, but it helped me stop staring at the ceiling for an hour after going to bed.
What none of us knew was that Mr. Lannom was a recovering alcoholic. By the time he stopped drinking, he'd done massive damage to his liver. He was dying, slowly and painfully. When I was in eighth grade, we came back from Christmas Break to a terse announcement that Mr. Lannom had passed away. But he didn't just "pass away", he took his own life to escape the excruciating pain, and it didn't take long for that information to surface and be passed around the entire student body. As kids are wont to do, tasteless jokes arose and were also passed around, and I lost what little respect I had for the students I went to middle school with.
And as is common when someone close commits suicide, I spent many years wondering if there was anything I could have done to help him, or if any of my sarcastic comments had ever hit too close to home. I highly doubt that the ramblings of a twelve-year-old were what drove him over the edge, and about the only thing I could have done for his physical pain would have been to develop a cure for cirrhosis overnight, but deep down it still nags, even to this day.
Two decades later, when I try to sit quietly for any length of time, I end up concentrating on my breathing because it's the only thing that doesn't make my mind wander off into fantasy-land and get me riled up again. And when I breathe deeply, I naturally slip into the cycle of breathing that Mr. Lannom taught me so long ago, breathing in through my nose and out through my my mouth. And then suddenly, I'm thirteen and missing one of my favorite teachers and hearing my peers make crass jokes that make me want to throttle them all. So much for relaxing.
One of the things on it is to relax before bed, in an effort to sleep better. Since I don't actually know how to meditate, I simply stretch for about 10 minutes and then try to sit quietly and breath deeply for another 10 minutes.
And then I end up thinking about Thomas Lannom, which pretty much kills any hope of quieting my mind.
Mr. Lannom was my seventh-grade social studies teacher. He had a slightly caustic attitude with a tendency to pick on people in a friendly-yet-sarcastic way. That also describes about 90% of my friends, so of course Mr. Lannom was one of my favorite teachers. I picked on him right back, too. I'd like to say that I was as gentle and careful about not hitting people's sore spots as he was, but I was twelve so I'm sure I lacked any finesse whatsoever. Still, he never seemed to hold it against me, and once in a while when things were going poorly, I'd talk to him about the trials and tribulations of Being Twelve. He never picked on me during those conversations, nor did I pick on him.
One day one of my fellow students fell asleep in class. Mr. Lannom woke him up in a not-so-gentle way (I can't recall if he threw something or dropped a heavy book; he'd been known to do both), and when the student used the excuse of not being able to get to sleep the night before, Mr. Lannom suggested a technique to help-- breathing in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth, and concentrating on your breath. I have no idea if it worked for the other sleepy student, but it helped me stop staring at the ceiling for an hour after going to bed.
What none of us knew was that Mr. Lannom was a recovering alcoholic. By the time he stopped drinking, he'd done massive damage to his liver. He was dying, slowly and painfully. When I was in eighth grade, we came back from Christmas Break to a terse announcement that Mr. Lannom had passed away. But he didn't just "pass away", he took his own life to escape the excruciating pain, and it didn't take long for that information to surface and be passed around the entire student body. As kids are wont to do, tasteless jokes arose and were also passed around, and I lost what little respect I had for the students I went to middle school with.
And as is common when someone close commits suicide, I spent many years wondering if there was anything I could have done to help him, or if any of my sarcastic comments had ever hit too close to home. I highly doubt that the ramblings of a twelve-year-old were what drove him over the edge, and about the only thing I could have done for his physical pain would have been to develop a cure for cirrhosis overnight, but deep down it still nags, even to this day.
Two decades later, when I try to sit quietly for any length of time, I end up concentrating on my breathing because it's the only thing that doesn't make my mind wander off into fantasy-land and get me riled up again. And when I breathe deeply, I naturally slip into the cycle of breathing that Mr. Lannom taught me so long ago, breathing in through my nose and out through my my mouth. And then suddenly, I'm thirteen and missing one of my favorite teachers and hearing my peers make crass jokes that make me want to throttle them all. So much for relaxing.
