Vox Meditantis

What could you do less of?

Monday, 8th December 2025

Someone ought to teach a course in subtraction – not the virtuous kind where one renounces chocolate or swearing, but the awkward mathematics of actually doing less whilst everything in one’s nervous system insists that less equals laziness, abandonment, or moral failure disguised as self-care.

The prompt arrived this morning tucked beneath yesterday’s thinking – What could you do less of? – which felt less like enquiry and more like an intervention staged by my own hand whilst the rest of me wasn’t paying attention.

Harbour Triage

Father Walsh was already at our usual meeting point when I arrived just after dawn, the harbour still deciding whether to commit to daylight or remain pewter a little longer. The tide was in that between-state I’ve grown to trust – neither arriving nor departing, just holding its breath before the next shift.

We walked without preamble, the cold properly December now, the sort that makes your face feel like it’s being gently but firmly reminded of its mortality. He mentioned Wilmington again – not as announcement but as ongoing negotiation with himself, the diocese, possibly God, though he’s too polite to confirm which party is proving most difficult.

“Still thinking,” he said, hands deep in coat pockets. “They want an answer by Epiphany.”

I made the appropriate noises – supportive, non-directive, the sort of pastoral murmuring that lets someone continue thinking aloud without feeling interrogated. But underneath, I was conducting my own audit.

Since he first mentioned the potential move in October, I’ve said yes to Maggie’s museum pilot – giving up Thursdays entirely, designing stillness rooms, training guides in the gentle art of not abandoning people mid-difficulty, and conducting oral history sessions with locals who’ve agreed to be recorded for the archive. I’ve signed up for watercolour classes that expose my incompetence with brushes to a roomful of neighbours. I’ve booked Québec for this Friday, rebooked it twice when the museum schedule shifted, and finally held firm when Rajesh requested additional supervision hours that would have required a third postponement.

I’ve invited David for meals that edge closer to domesticity than I’m entirely comfortable with. I’ve cleared the guest room enough to host Michael and Linda, who left yesterday morning after a weekend visit that required me to be visibly mid-process rather than finished.

And I’ve been writing these daily entries with the dedicated intensity of someone who’s discovered that narrating one’s life in real time creates the pleasant illusion of forward momentum even when the actual living feels stuck.

Apparently my response to any possible absence is to schedule three new presences.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Father Walsh observed, not unkindly.

“Which thing?”

“Wearing yourself out with good works so you won’t have to feel anything when I leave.”

“If you leave.”

“Catherine.”

We stood watching a gull negotiate wind and ambition, both of us knowing he was right.

Inventory of Too-Muchness

By the time I reached the office, my clinical brain – which is reliably less sentimental than my actual brain – had assembled the list:

Things I Am Currently Doing Too Much Of:

Saying yes at work when “no, not this month” would be clinically appropriate for everyone involved. Just last week I agreed to supervise a trainee whose previous supervisor relocated, despite my schedule already resembling a particularly aggressive game of Tetris. The rationalisation was immediate and fluent: she needs continuity, you have the expertise, it’s only an hour weekly. All true. Also irrelevant to whether I have the bandwidth.

Checking email and news “just in case” when nothing in my life qualifies as an actual emergency. The harbour isn’t going anywhere. My patients have my office number for crises. The world’s various catastrophes will unfold whether or not I refresh the headlines at 10:47 PM whilst standing in my kitchen pretending I came downstairs for water.

Refreshing the blog dashboard and noting – with a mix of warmth and alarm – that most days I can identify every single reader by name, sometimes by IP address. This has crossed from “small community project” into “round-the-clock clinical notes on myself,” and I’m no longer entirely sure who it’s serving.

The museum work is worthwhile. The supervision is needed. The watercolour class is teaching me something essential about public fumbling. But I’ve been conducting my life like someone who believes that if she stops moving, something terrible will notice her standing still.

This is what I wrote about months ago – weaponised busyness, competence as shelter, the thoroughly modern delusion that if one simply schedules enough adjacent presences, one never has to risk actual intimacy or, God forbid, rest.

What I Could Do Less Of (And Why It Scares Me)

Three candidates, named plainly before I can dress them in qualifications:

• Less over-functioning in the clinic. I have been treating gaps between sessions as spare capacity rather than metabolising time. The fifty minutes I hold for patients matter profoundly; the ten minutes between them matter almost as much. That’s when I make notes, yes, but also when my nervous system processes what it just held, when I return to myself before opening the door to someone else’s difficulty. Protecting those gaps isn’t indulgence – it’s maintenance. The sort that prevents the kind of exhaustion that makes one dangerous to patients and insufferable to oneself.

• Less digital noise. I’ve been experimenting, quietly, with phone-off hours – evenings when the mobile goes in the desk drawer and the world, shockingly, continues to turn. What I’ve discovered is that the urgency I feel about being available is rarely matched by actual urgent need. Most messages can wait until morning. Most news will still be catastrophic at breakfast. And the quality of attention I bring to the risotto, the book, the harbour view improves immeasurably when I’m not performing availability for an audience that isn’t actually watching.

• Less narrating my life in real time for strangers and near-strangers. This one lands with particular force. These daily entries began as an experiment in visibility – could I practice being seen as Catherine, not just Dr Bennett? Could I risk ordinariness in public? The answer has been yes, and it’s been valuable. But somewhere in the past weeks, the blog has started to feel like round-the-clock clinical supervision of my own life, where no experience counts until it’s been processed into prose and posted for witness. I’m narrating instead of inhabiting. Curating instead of living.

And here’s the part that frightens me: subtraction exposes emptier spaces where feeling and desire might surface. If I’m not scheduling, not refreshing, not writing – what’s left? What arrives in the silence that I’ve been so carefully, so competently, filling?

A Small, Specific Experiment

For this week – well, these last few days before Québec, assuming I don’t reschedule again – I’m committing to three subtractions:

One fewer patient per day. Not dramatically, just the last slot on Tuesday and Wednesday, the hours when I’m most likely to be running on fumes and professional muscle memory rather than genuine attention. I’ll use those hours to walk, to sit, to stare at the harbour without converting it into metaphor. Rajesh will understand. The waitlist will survive.

One evening with the phone in a drawer and no “just checking” the blog statistics. Tonight, in fact. After this posts, the laptop closes and stays closed. I will make supper, I will read another novel that Jenny pressed into my hands last week, I will go to bed at an hour that doesn’t require justification. And I will not know how many people read this entry until tomorrow morning, which will teach me something about whether the writing serves connection or simply anxiety management.

Treating these entries as single daily sketches rather than full case reports. Some days the prompt will receive two paragraphs and a wry observation. Not every reflection requires architectural development. Not every feeling needs clinical framing. Sometimes less is not failure – it’s proportion.

What Grows in the Silence

David sent a message yesterday afternoon, after Michael and Linda had left and the flat returned to its post-occupancy quiet. Simple enough – a photograph of the river under grey sky and the line: Safe travels to Québec on Friday. When you’re back – harbour walk and that terrible café tea you keep defending? The Saturday after, if you’re free?

My first instinct was to write back immediately with the sort of warm, measured response I’ve perfected – enthusiastic but not excessive, clear but not demanding. My second instinct was to check the blog analytics, respond to two patient emails that could easily wait until Monday, and generally fill the space his message had opened with productive activity.

Instead, I’ve let it sit.

Not because I’m playing games or cultivating mystery, but because I wanted to notice what it feels like to be asked, to sit with being wanted in that uncomplicated way, without immediately converting it into a task requiring completion.

I’ll reply tonight, after this posts and the laptop closes. Something simple and true. Yes, I’d like that. The harbour and your company when I’m back. See you the 20th.

But first, the silence. The odd, unsettling luxury of letting someone’s invitation exist in the world without rushing to resolve it, to tidy it, to turn desire into logistics before the feeling can become inconvenient.

I wonder – and I’m leaving this as a question, not a manifesto – what it would be like to do less of this daily public writing. Not to stop entirely, but to let some days go unrecorded, some reflections remain private, some experiments happen without the pressure of eventual narrative coherence.

If only to see what grows in the silence. Whether the courage I’ve been documenting so carefully can survive without constant witness. Whether Catherine Bennett, fifty-eight, learning late to risk ordinary intimacy, might occasionally exist outside these entries – unnarrated, unprocessed, simply present in her own life.

The harbour is darkening early, December dusk arriving without apology. Tomorrow will bring its sessions, its small revelations and setbacks. But tonight, the phone goes in the drawer. The blog dashboard stays closed. And I will practice, just for a few hours, the gentle art of doing less.

The river keeps its counsel. I’m learning to do the same – a little less tightly, a little less publicly, one small subtraction at a time.

Catherine

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.