Brooke McAlary - Care: the radical art of taking time

Have you ever wondered where the days go once we live them?

When moments have turned into memories and stories and the slowly expanding growth rings of trees? Does time simply disintegrate, like ash on the wind? Does it live on in the smile lines around our eyes, the photos on our fridge, the lessons learnt and forgotten and relearnt? Can we harness time? Can we expand and fill it as we choose? Or is it fixed and rigid?

I think time is a wonderful, infuriating, gelatinous thing that constantly shifts and morphs. Some moments seem to stretch out far beyond the seconds they inhabit, while others escape through our fingers no matter how tightly we try to hold them. How else can we explain why some days slip swiftly by, while others are a slow-moving parade of moments that surely add up to more than twenty-four hours? How can some years leave us with hardly a memory and others leave everything transformed in their slow, boiling wake?

2020 was like that. One day everything felt normal, status quo in place (for better or worse) and, in the space of a few weeks, everything changed. It was the year time played tricks on us, when months seemed to last years while the year was somehow both the longest and shortest in memory.

2020 was the year our hearts broke. The year of kindness. The year of uncertainty. The year we craved each other. The year we hunkered down. The year of Zoom. The year of pause. The year of frustration. The year of hope. The year of sadness. The year we learnt the real value of a hug. It was also the year I discovered I cared too much. And the year I discovered I didnt care enough.

Care. As far as words go, its a relatively simple one, isnt it?

When we read it, maybe it conjures an image of a gardener tending their vegetable patch, a parent hugging a child, a nurse caring for a patient. Comforting, simple and wholesome. Dig a little deeper though, start to look at the multitude of ways we use the word care in our lives, and suddenly its quite a complicated little four-letter word, one that we have a complex relationship with.

Care is both something we can have (noun) and something we can do (verb). It can mean love, compassion, empathy, tenderness, accuracy, attention, responsibility, caution, stewardship, maintenance, repair, watchfulness and assistance. We care when we show up for people (Let me care for you) and withhold it to shut people out (I dont care about that). We harness it to fight for causes we believe in (She cares passionately about this) and deploy it as a defence mechanism to protect our vulnerabilities (I couldnt care less what he thinks of me). We can give it, deny it, guard it, offer it freely, mete it out frugally, remove it without warning and devote ourselves to it.

Its also a biological trait of every human being and sits at the evolutionary centre of our survival. Even Charles Darwin (yes, the father of the survival of the fittest theory) hypothesised that the species with the highest levels of sympathy and care built into their social structure would be the most likely to survive and thrive in a brutal world.

In spite of this, I dont care, or one of its variations, is a response many of us give in the course of a normal day. Not, I believe, because of a lack of decency in the modern world, but because our hard-wired need to care didnt evolve in todays world. A modern world that is full and noisy and busy and ripe with endless opportunities to care about virtually anything. Mere decades ago, our spheres of care were mostly limited to what was happening in our own communities or what we were shown on the nightly news. Now our devices feed us a steady diet of information, much of it simultaneously troubling and worthy of our attention. We hear terrible news; we see vitriol and prejudice writ large on our social-media timelines. We see our planet suffering, our fellow human beings divided along an increasing number of lines, while callousness and judgement and disunity dominate the conversation. Our ability to care is not limitless, our energy not infinite and, to put it plainly, were exhausted. But because were wired to, we try to careeven when it hurts. We care about the suffering of others, we care about the destruction of place, we care about injustice. And you know what? I think this capacity of ours to care is the superpower that will help us change the world.

Now, before you roll your eyes at the over-the-top grandiosity of that statement (and Id understand if you did), let me add thiswhile yes, I believe that care is at the heart of changing the world, there are many, many ways of going about it and not all of them need to be big.

Like a lot of people, I spent the better part of 2020 caring hard. About the Covid pandemic, the climate crisis, racial injustice and social inequality. I gave almost all my attention, all my energy, all my care to reading and learning about these things, forming opinions about them, thinking about obstacles and solutions and actions at ungodly hours of the night. It seemed like every conversation, every interaction I had was seen through the lens of these enormous problems, and for a while, it felt good to care so much about them. It felt human. But over time, the lens became grimy with frustration and anger, and I found I could no longer see clearly. I think I got tired. So tired, that one morning, I couldnt get out of bed. I was physically, mentally and emotionally spent and I found myself numb to most of the things that had previously brought me joy. I stopped writing, I stopped gardening, I stopped reading, I stopped working altogether. I had no desire to connect, no desire to care. I retreated inward to escape the exhaustion. I didnt want to matter and I didnt want anything else to matter because, seemingly overnight, it had all begun to hurttoo much.

I realise now that I had slipped into the trap so many of us do and fallen headfirst into what I call Big Carecaring almost solely about those complex, global problems that dominate the headlines. At the time, though, it felt like I had suddenly stopped caring, and that was frightening.

Ive since come to believe that we each have a personal spectrum of caring. Its not used to rank things as more or less worthy of our care, but to identify the different kinds of care that exist in our lives. On one end is Big Care: those expansive, global issues such as politics and environmental crises. On the other is self-care: our physical and mental health, mindfulness and self-talk. Both ends of the spectrumas well as all the things in betweenare valid and crucial, but I have a theory that much of what we experience as blind outrage or numbness or bone-deep emotional exhaustion in our modern lives actually comes from an imbalance in how we care.

When we focus solely on the big problems, we can become obsessive and overwhelmed, caught in a pattern of doom-scrolling and anger, and as a result lose sight of smaller, powerful, more accessible acts of care. Similarly, if we live exclusively in the realm of self-care, we risk becoming self-indulgent, sheltered and caught up in ever-shifting wellness trends without enjoying the wider benefits of community care. Living solely at either end of the spectrum can be exhausting and limiting in equal measure and will impact our health, relationships, self-esteem, families, communities and work.