I’m being pulled, every which way. I need to do the dishes, I need to do the laundry, I have to write the report – maybe I just need to rest.

If I tell others I can’t do this right now, they might tell me I don’t care enough. Well, do I not care enough? How do I know if I’m being selfish?

The Push/Pull of Caring

In our younger days, we may have turned in so-called sloppy work. Often some comment of not caring enough is applied somewhere along the way. Said enough times, we might wonder about this of ourselves. Maybe it’s true.

Wandering minds already have enough to struggle with. To stay on track we can create any number of guides, lists, markers, all these sorts of things that help us move forward.

But in the meantime, even with these in helping us, we often have to pull ourselves back from one thing after another. We move into one thing, we get distracted. We dive deep into another, we might have to fight to pull ourselves out. It can be terribly exhausting, and yet there are still things to do.

Wallowing in the Overwhelm of Caring

Do we not have enough willpower? Or is it that we don’t care enough? Even when we say, “I don’t care,” the fact that something entered our mind, even to negate it, means that something about it has our attention. In this way, caring is hardly some binary thing.

What is care?

What is it though? What is care? In one sense, well, it’s an emotion. We can even point at it neuroanatomically: pathways and transmitters, dendritic connections and the like. We can also see it as an emotion in the sense of that which brushes into consciousness. Whether gently in barely perceptible waves or in crushing impossible storms.

What I think is often missed in discussions about care is that it’s more than an emotion. Beyond that, it is this spirit and practice.

Harnessing the Power of Care

Care flows through, and with, emotion. Emanating from meaning in the stories of our lives into that of perception, thought, action — at the very least. Often, care can be this wonderful spirit around which we can organize ourselves; doing the things that we feel to be helpful to those around us.

Care involves a depth of attention on something. It’s the spirit that nourishes, that creates the bed of intuition, that tempers and guides strength, the force of mystery of a force at all. We care in considering, when we rest our minds in some experience, our interests, our intentions attuning to what is.

Ideally, we may even take our time. Find patience to reach some gentle acknowledgement where our decisions are deliberate. We can heighten that powerful measure of being. Agency itself.

When we care for others, when we care for ourselves, when we care for the emotions of play and curiosity and discovery within ourselves. We can often fly on this feeling of mastery, meaningful work, and meaningful relationships.

The Invisible Weight of Caring

But there can be a burden to caring. As a spirit, it’s eons old, an entity carried within and through us from the inception of whenever life began to care for life. Care is its own life, running deep within us. And as a spirit, it has its own needs. It draws resources from us. It takes our time, our attention, the materials of ourselves. And resources are limited. Caught within us.

Care can be pressed and pulled in many competing directions. Loved ones, ourselves, multiple others. Because of limits, we must make decisions and sometimes they are terribly difficult, sometimes at our sacrifice, sometimes at others, and often at both.

In losing sight of limits, we often then wonder whether we care enough, that we don’t care for everything then, and somehow because of that we are terrible.

It’s not the care itself that is limited, so much as it is the resources. In losing sight of these limits we then might wonder, do we care enough? And if we don’t, that somehow we’re terrible.

Often, this leads into a feeling of burden. We may even resent the feeling of care itself, sensing that burden. That sense itself, in turn, can feel selfish — touching off feelings of guilt and shame and more as care’s complexity grows.

Care Confused with Worry

Sometimes care is confused with worry. Worry, anxiety, these signals that something might be wrong, something’s amiss. Maybe something might happen in the future. There’s some risk for loss. We might then feel that in order to care, we have to exacerbate that feeling, indulge it, stir it, stoke it, fan the flames.

But this too becomes a path where we might exhaust ourselves into a sense of worry that we are uncaring, not just exhausted. Often, then that leads to some method of abusing ourselves, shaming ourselves, yelling at ourselves, accusing ourselves of being uncaring. Maybe that would help us care more, that would help us get the things done.

If we continue to use worry as our measure of care, we might try to bring risk to zero. Essentially attempting to rid ourselves of anxiety as the measure. But worry cannot be brought to zero. We not only exhaust ourselves, but risk crushing others. We smother.

Other Confusions of Care

Care may even be fused or confused with righteousness. This attempt to be good or moral then perverted into cruelty. Of course worry can relate to care. It’s a message of something that might be injured or lost. To the degree we can, perhaps an ideal, we can acknowledge that message and say, “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”

Even here, we must be able to accept risk, limits, and mortality itself as an inevitability in order to care well. Even more maliciously, care can be hijacked by others who intend to manipulate. A weaponizing of vulnerability, an indulgence of victimhood to pull at the heartstrings.

Whether done consciously or unconsciously, we may end up sacrificing ourselves, perhaps inadvertently. Losing the path’s care we could have otherwise offered to others. In this way, care is not simply some unmitigated good. Care needs its own care.

And of course, as we care for ourselves, we can care better for others. Doing so, beyond spirit then, beyond emotion, care is a skill. And as a skill it can be practiced. Sometimes it’s simple. Putting on your mask before putting someone else’s on, is very much this practice.

Nurturing Our Care Practice

Care, also as the mother of consideration, of acknowledgement, as the holder of agency, can be practiced.  When we anchor ourselves considering the options of the moment. When we pause at the edge of action. When we pause to consider how to guide our momentum of the moment.

When we recognize the limits of our working memory. When we know and stand up for the limitations we’ve discovered. When we pay attention to our frustration and sense.

When we pay attention to our frustration and use it to help find the ease within it. To discover a way forward. When we clear and support paths for the development of things we find meaningful. When we recognize the limits of our lives, our days, and feel the pain in those limits without indulging them, without ignoring them.

We practice care.

I’d like to close with a comment that I’d read on Reddit. It goes like this:

“When I was younger, I had many dreams and complex purposes like getting rich, become a famous doctor, and things like that. By living life and having experiences, good ones and bad ones, job and relationships and life overall, I learned that a simple purpose made me happier than ever.

And that purpose is to care. Care for my family. Care for those in need, care for my dogs. Now I just care and that’s my purpose ’til the day I die.”

– Kourosh