Batteries
Energy coming in, energy going out, energy in reserve
I've been thinking about batteries for the past two weeks. The battery has become a metaphor for our emotional and physical capacity. It was more than that, though. I was staying in an off-grid house, so I was thinking about literal batteries.
I relaxed as soon as I landed on the island, partly because flights to the Azores are known for their strong winds and tiny runways and it was a relief to get out of the plane. Still, it took nearly a week — where the only drama on the farm was between the geese and the chickens — to really feel like myself again.
I was pleased whenever I was looking up at a blue sky, knowing the solar panels were charging the batteries. On rainy days I kept an eye on the river below, knowing that if the current was strong I'd need to turn off the hydro system so the intake wouldn't get clogged with debris.
Energy is coming into the system and leaving it at different rates all the time. On cloudy days and at night, the solar panels don't generate energy. When the creek is running low there's less power coming into the system. And if I have to turn the hydro system off because the creek is churning with debris during a storm, I'm running just on batteries. After a storm it can take days until the batteries are fully charged again.
This is why an hour to yourself — or even a weekend — is not enough. When you're starting from zero, it's going to take a while to get back up there. As a provider of care, it's unlikely you're recharging to balance out the energy you're expending. Your battery never gets up to 100%, making it impossible to give 100%. There are a lot of people regularly relying on battery power, because there’s nothing coming in.
I can't control whether or not the sun is shining. I can't control the amount of water flowing down the creek. I can sort of control my electricity use, although that will only get me so far unless I want to sit in the dark from 5pm to 8am. It's fine because the system has redundancy and reserves built into it — both solar and hydro, with the battery system. If something goes wrong I have people to call (or, since wifi requires power, to hike to the road and knock on their door).
We can't speed things up. We can't do much to change our capacity. We have limited control over what we need to do each day. We may not be in a system that has backups and alternate sources. Sometimes the only thing we can do is stop blaming ourselves for things that are outside of our control.
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Your battery analogy is so helpful, thank you! I haven’t even made it to your links yet.
I was the sole caregiver for my mother as she died of cancer. A wise friend told me that I was my mother's battery. Anything that drained the battery had to go.