Caregiving, with its endless demands, holds a hidden risk. Protocols can be monotonous. Soon, spiritual atrophy may settle in. Light fades and we enter a gray life that sits right on the edge of shadows.

      “Here comes another body,” I heard
a recovery nurse say one morning as I did my rounds through her area. Indeed,
that’s what the unconscious patient looked like. Deprived of everyday reality by
anesthetics, the patient appeared almost comatose.

      I watched this nurse perform her
tasks as matter-of-factly as if she were cooking a hamburger. Her eyes were
dead as a subway rider. Her tone was flat. Since I have never been a first line caregiver, I can only sympathize with her challenges.  

      “How long have you been a recovery
nurse,” I asked.

      “Twenty years,” she responded with
a sense of fatigue rather than energy.

      “Have you ever thought about
working in another area?”

      “Not any more,” she answered. “I’m
pretty much stuck here.”

     At the age of forty-three, she
could be “stuck” in that area for another twenty-two years. Already, she may
be one who counts the minutes until her shift ends, the
days until the weekend, the months until retirement.

     It’s easy to see why anyone for
whom work has become a chore might be tired. Amid daily fatigue, generating the
energy to reignite your soul with new approaches may seem both too hard and
too complicated.

     My heart breaks for the millions of
caregivers who have fallen into this trap. What may have seemed like an
exciting challenge in its dawning has become Chinese Water Torture.

     Equally tragic are caregivers who
live in fear. Their daily lives feel threatened by anxiety over the risk of
mistakes and over worry that the boss will punish them or, worse, fire them.
Crossfire from fellow caregivers may also drain hope.

     Even at
young ages, change can be difficult. Life grabs hold of us rapidly teaching its
basic lessons: seek pleasure, avoid pain, cultivate comfort, be happy, “don’t
rock the boat.”

     The older we become, the longer we
have been in the same job, the more challenging change becomes. For those who
have chosen careers in caregiving, spiritual
atrophy may begin as early as five years into the work.

     Caregiving roles teach protocols.
Protocols swiftly become routines. Routines can soon seem boring.

     “Christ what are
patterns for?” Edna Saint Vincent Millay wrote in a poem expressing her horror of the killing in World War I.

     Daily patterns can silence our
soul’s strength. Patterned thinking can become the enemy of the kind of fresh
living that keeps compassion alive. Rote behavior can lead us to do some jobs with only ten percent of our
attention.

     “He who has a why can bear almost any how," Victor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  It is our "why" that gives us the will to live against life's most crushing setbacks. 

    That is the reason to change. If we are "dying" in our work and in our everyday lives, we need to find a new "why."

     How do we become care lovers rather than care haters?

     Thursday's Journal offers some answers.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph – "Gray Pavement" copyright erie chapman 2012

[The above article is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care]