Focus:
Understanding that your nervous system is listening, and giving it signals of safety.
Repetition:
My nervous system is safe.
My body knows how to heal.
I am held. I am whole.
The Spoons We Are Given
There is a story that has quietly passed from sickbed to sickbed for more than twenty years now, and if you have lived inside a failing body you already know it. A young woman named Christine Miserandino was sitting in a diner with a friend who wanted to understand what living with lupus was really like. So Christine gathered up every spoon within reach, a whole fistful of them from the surrounding tables, and pressed them into her friend’s hands. This, she said, is what you have.
Every healthy person wakes with a drawer full of spoons and never once has to count them. But when you are ill, you are handed only a few, and every single thing you do costs you one. Getting out of bed: a spoon. Showering: a spoon. Standing long enough to make breakfast: another. Choose to see a friend and you may have spent the day’s last spoon before noon, with nothing left for supper, and no way to borrow against tomorrow.
The Language That Named Our Lives
That fistful of spoons gave us a word for something we had been unable to explain. In the chronic illness world we became “spoonies,” and it was not a joke; it was a mercy. Finally there was a way to tell the people we loved why we had to leave the party early, why a shower could be the whole of a day’s accomplishment, why we said no again.
Spoon theory let us plan our lives like careful stewards of a small and precious currency. It taught us to ask, before we spent, whether this was worth a spoon. It taught us that rest was not laziness but accounting. For those of us who have spent years learning our own limits the hard way, it has been one of the truest maps we own.
But I have come to believe that the spoons were never only for the sick. I think they were a truth about being human that most of the modern world simply forgot, and that illness, for all its cruelty, forced us to remember first.
Even the Healthiest Among Us
Here is the thing we do not say often enough: no human being is made of endless energy. Not one. The healthiest person who ever lived (and most of us have never actually met such a person, born and raised in the conditions a body is designed for) still wakes with a finite number of spoons. They simply start the day with a fuller drawer, and they do not empty it as fast. But it empties. It always empties. This is not a defect of the sick. It is the shape of a life.
Mary Ruddick, the medical nutritionist who has spent years living among the last traditional peoples on earth (the Daasanach of Ethiopia, the Karen of Thailand, the Hadza, the Batwa, and the herders of Mongolia), describes exactly this. These are people with remarkable vitality, robust and clear-eyed and strong into old age, carrying far more spoons than we do and burning through them far more slowly.
And yet here is what she does not report: she does not describe them pulling all-nighters. She does not describe them pushing through exhaustion to finish a project, skipping meals to hit a deadline, or trading sleep for productivity. Their abundance of energy has not made them reckless with it. If anything, it is the opposite. They live inside rhythm (work, then play, then rest), the way the day itself moves from morning to noon to night.
The Rhythm We Were Never Taught
This is the piece the modern world lost. We were handed, most of us, a fuller drawer than we now carry, and we spent it as though it could never run dry. We celebrated the person who worked hardest and slept least. We called exhaustion ambition. We drank the coffee to override the tiredness that was our body’s honest accounting, and we felt virtuous doing it. “Work hard, play hard,” we said, like a blessing. It was, in truth, a slow way of emptying the drawer and then prying it open to scrape at spoons that were never really there.
The traditional peoples Mary visits do not live this way, and neither did our own great-grandparents. They lived in seasons and in rhythms. There was hard work, yes, but it ended. There was rest, real rest, and it was not earned by collapse. There was play and feast and Sabbath woven into the ordinary week, not hoarded for a two-week vacation that arrives too depleted to enjoy. They counted their spoons without ever needing the word for it, because the rhythm did the counting for them.
The Temptation of Remission
And so I want to say something to those of us who are healing, those who are watching the spoons slowly return, feeling energy we had almost forgotten come back into our hands. This is the tender, dangerous moment. Because the temptation, the very instant we feel strong, is to rush back into the old life. To take the new spoons and spend them exactly the way we spent the old ones: fast, hard, without counting, proving to the world and to ourselves that we are “back.”
Please, let us not.
The new energy we are being given is not a repayment for the years we lost, to be blown on making up for lost time. It is not permission to return to the very patterns that helped hollow us out in the first place. We did not survive this only to sprint back into the way of living that could not tell the difference between a person and a machine.
We learned, in the long slow years of illness, something most of the well never learn: how to slow down. How to be present. How to treat a spoon as sacred. That was not the sickness talking. That was wisdom, bought at a terrible price, and it would be a grief to hand it back the moment we no longer strictly need it.
Keep the spoons close. Keep counting them, gently, for the rest of your life, not in fear but in reverence. A body that has learned its own rhythm and honours it is a body that stays well.
A Mass Remembering
This is why I say, again and again, that the Ancestral Regeneration Protocol was never merely a diet and a recovery plan. Those are the doorway, not the house. What we are really doing is walking out: a slow, deliberate exodus from a way of living that forgot how to be human. A way that severed us from sun and soil and season, from rest and rhythm and one another, and then wondered why we grew sick.
What we are building in its place is not new at all. It is a remembering. A return to the human way of living that the tribes still hold and the Saints still teach and our own bodies, it turns out, never entirely forgot.
We are learning to live inside rhythm again (work and play and rest in their right measure) and to guard the spoons we are given as the gift they are. Not so we can do more. So we can live well: in health, in joy, and in peace, for all the days we are given.
I am so proud of you and love you all!