I Eat Standing Up

Before anything else, the same words that open every page on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever stands in for a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If anybody in your house has you worried, get them seen today. That is not panic, that is the first sensible thing.

Now. A small question, and it is not rhetorical.

When did you last sit down to eat?

Not eat. Sit down to eat. At a table, with the plate in front of you rather than in your hand, without one ear listening down the hall.

I ask because I have been in a lot of houses in this condition, and there is a thing that happens that nobody plans and nobody notices. Meals stop being events and become fuel taken standing up at a counter. Toast at the sink. Half of something at the stove. Whatever was left on their tray.

And then it goes further, and every single thing gets done standing. The phone call is taken standing. The conversation with your sister happens standing. A person can live like that for eight weeks and never once notice that they have stopped sitting down.

Somebody sat down and was defended for it

There is a scene in a house in Bethany that gets used to divide women into two types, and I do not think that is what it is doing at all.

And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word. (Luke 10:39, King James Version)

Two sisters, one house, one guest. One of them is doing the serving and one of them has sat down.

And what is defended, in the verses that follow, is the sitting. Not because the serving is wrong. The serving is not condemned anywhere in that passage. What is corrected is the idea that sitting down is a dereliction.

You are permitted to sit down in a house where there is work, and sitting has never once been the same as abandoning anybody. Luke 10:39 has a woman seated in the middle of a household that was busy, and the seating is what gets defended out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a carer put a plate on a table.

I want to be careful, because I am not about to tell you your household does not need serving. It plainly does and you are the one doing it. The correction in that passage is not aimed at work. It is aimed at a state of mind that cannot stop.

You have been taken up with much serving and no one has ever once asked for that phrase to describe you. The Spirit of God is the one who separates a woman from her own momentum, and it is written that Mary sat and heard, which the passage records as the thing she chose rather than the thing she failed to do.

What standing does to a person after eight weeks

Let me be practical, because that is what this page is for.

Eating on your feet does two things, and neither one of them is about the food.

The first is that it removes the only natural pause in a day. A sat down meal is twenty minutes when a person is not doing anything, and a day with no such twenty minutes is a day that runs continuously from the alarm to the pillow.

The second is quieter and worse. Standing is the posture of somebody about to be interrupted. A person who eats standing has told themselves, every single time, that they are still on duty. Do that at every meal for two months and the body learns that there is no off.

You are teaching yourself something every time you eat at that counter, and nobody has ever once been made more available by being permanently braced. Luke 10:39 shows a woman at rest inside a household with work in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person back a posture they have not used in weeks.

And here is the part your family cannot say to you. They notice. They notice you standing at the end of the table with a plate in your hand, and they do not know how to ask you to sit down without it sounding like a criticism.

You were never asked to be on duty at every hour, and the household has never once wanted you standing. The Spirit of God is the one who ends a vigil that nobody requested, and what is written puts a seated woman in the middle of a busy house without a word of rebuke.

The plain routing, and one of these calls is for you

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on an article for carers it has two halves.

If something is happening right now with the person you are caring for, that is 911, and it is before anything else on this page. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up, and that number is for you and not only for the one in the bed. And whatever has been going on in that house goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are inside the group of people this routing is for, and you have never once been outside it. Luke 10:39 puts the carer and the one at rest in the same room rather than in separate categories, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody count themselves in.

And I would add one more, gently. If you have not been seen yourself in a long time, that is the other call, and it is yours.

You have an appointment of your own that nobody in that house has ever once resented. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a carer to make a call for herself, and what is written defends the one who sat down while the serving was still going on.