Indulgence is not the same as care
Care is bigger. Care is what you give to someone who matters.
An essayist and memoirist whose work I admire was once asked at a reading if he ever wrote pieces and then stuck them in a drawer without publishing them.
At first, he could not quite understand the question. He replied that he’d been lucky in that publishers always seemed to want what he was writing. When he understood that it was more about whether he ever thought a piece too individual, too personal or too specific to put into the world, he gave an answer that has stayed with me ever since.
“No,” he said. “I assume that if a topic resonated with me enough for me to write about, then it will resonate with someone else. So I publish it.”
What is resonating with me just now is a series of thoughts about the nature of care, and about how care and indulgence and protection might come to be confused for each other when one is thinking about the care of oneself.
Just to spell out the basic premises: care in this context means making decisions and taking actions with overall well-being (present and future) in mind. Indulgence is doing what one wishes, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Protection is warding off possible harm.
Indulgence and protection are both elements of care, but care is bigger. Care balances gains and benefits of indulgence and protection against drawbacks and costs. Care does not always take the easiest route. Care pays attention.
A few years ago I read an article about a dementia home in the Netherlands. The home is actually a village. The entire open-air establishment is designed to feel like — in fact, to be — a village, in which residents live together in ordinary houses with carers, and move freely indoors and out, going to stores and cafes and so forth. In the stores and cafes there is no need for money, and all of the personnel are actually care-givers.
There are many staff members, and a great deal of oversight of the outdoor areas, including with cameras; but still, people with dementia are not always shadowed every moment as they move around the space of the village. There is a chance that someone might fall, for instance.
The article included an interview with someone who worked in the dementia village. The person said that sometimes visitors express concern that the residents have too much freedom, that they are at risk. The person’s reply was something along the lines of “Yes, there is a slight risk that a patient, walking alone, might, for instance, fall. But we want to balance that against the benefits to their quality of life of actually living in dignity and freedom, and we think that we have reached the right balance.”
All of this is from memory (as is the exchange with the essayist above), so I might have got it a bit wrong.
But it illustrates the core argument of this essay, which is that care is large, and care makes decisions against an overarching test of present and future well-being.
Care is also attentive. In a recent essay, the writer and professor of nursing June Girvin describes her earliest training in care, which came from a master nurse who demonstrated to her how to clean the body of a patient of theirs who had just died, with gentleness and respect and attention. Girvin continues:
Later in my career, I would witness nurses who were inattentive to their erstwhile patient, chatting to each other as they did their ‘laying out’. As if they were washing a mannequin, rather than a fellow human being. Or would that be a human used-to-be? Exchanging gossip and inane chatter as they perfunctorily washed and dried, rolled and wrapped. Thoughtless and disrespectful.
It [the training by the senior nurse] was the best of lessons to learn in those first days; and it was an experience that began a slow and building comprehension that it takes much more to become a nurse than the simple performance of tasks, no matter how technical. I was learning about being present in these moments, giving of myself, […] taking pride in the work, drawing out learning and experience for the future. Giving and taking.1
This discussion was probably in the back of my mind when I did a small experiment shortly after writing “Milosz in California.”
That piece uses the writings of the poet Czeslaw Milosz to try to understand the contradictions of the hippie era in Northern California in the 1970s. It includes this passage:
Not long ago, shortly after reading these passages from Milosz […], I was chatting with someone about the difference between care and indulgence.
I’d been complaining about my lack of ability to deal with minor medical things, a doctor’s appointment that I’d been putting off making. “Do you think that you’re not worthy of a doctor’s appointment?” she asked.
I laughed. I am one of the most self-indulgent people I know, I told her. Of course that was not the question.
“Indulgence is not the same as care,” she said.
And with that, it all fell into place.
Bolinas [a small town in California] was free, and one could do anything one wanted. One could stay up late, and decide to stop brushing one’s hair, and go walking alone on the beach before one knew about the need to be on solid land before the tides rose and took the beach away.
One could learn to indulge oneself, with some excellent outcomes (I have never worried about what other people might think when making decisions for myself, for instance).
But none of that is the same as care.
This morning, writing this, I was so caught up that I decided to keep going instead of eating. There is also not really anything in the house to eat.
I would never, ever, allow someone under my care to go so long without a good meal, or to have a lack of food in the house, just so that I could write. Doing it to myself is indulgence, not care.2
The minor medical thing mentioned in the paragraphs above was a small skin irritation. I had seen someone about it, and been recommended an over-the-counter cream that I had dutifully been applying twice a day, in the morning and evening.
The evening after writing the Milosz essay, I decided to see what, if anything, would change if I applied the cream as if I were applying it to someone else: as if I were doing it for someone I was caring for.
The difference was stunning, and upsetting. As in the June Givirn essay, it was not the actions themselves that were different, precisely, but rather the atmosphere. It was so different that I was horrified. I realised that if any carer had been applying a cream to my elderly mother’s skin with the same disconnect and lack of caring that I had been applying this one to my own, I would have seen it as an emergency. You simply don’t do that for someone whom you see as a real human being who matters.
A few days later, I spent a morning preparing the house for a worker who was coming to fix a problem. It was easiest just to plough through, so by 1 pm, shortly before the appointed time, I had not yet eaten or drunk anything.
It occurred to me then that if I had had a guest staying with me who had offered to help with the preparations, I could never, ever have allowed the guest to go without breakfast and lunch. Not even in order to indulge my desire just to get the work done. It would have been inconceivable, just as it would have been inconceivable, if I were caring for someone else, to have applied that little skin cream in so alienated, so resentful, a way.
If we are caring for someone, then we indulge them, of course — indulgence is wonderful! — and we protect them — protection is essential! — but always as a result of judgement.
What interests me now is how something that seems so obvious when applied to care for other people can become confused when it comes to care for oneself.
And in particular, I’m interested in how one might come to be simultaneously ready to indulge oneself — as in literally smelling the roses, a very lovely thing — and yet almost actively resist providing care for oneself in the way that one provides it without hesitation to other people.
Growing up in the kind of extreme freedom of the 1970s, as in my case, might have imbued some of its children with an unshaken belief in a kind of basic indulgence: not in materialism, and not in desire for status or anything as unsubtle as that, but simply in the idea that one should do what one wanted to do, within of course one’s own moral code and with regard for any harm for others.
At the same time, it may have left some of its children without any real experience of the larger kind of attentive care that we are speaking of here.
It’s confusing, though, as generosity was so much part of the mix as well.
One of my happiest memories of Bolinas is of how we never cooked just enough dinner for our own family, because one never knew who might be stopping by and one always wanted to be able to invite people to stay on and eat if they liked.
If one made a stirfry with tofu and vegetables, one made a great deal of extra rice, to stretch it out in case of sudden guests. One could make rice pudding the next day, if it ended up being too much.
If one made a pot of lentil soup, one made 50% more than the family could eat. It would always be eaten as leftovers the next day, if it ended up being too much.
We all took turns cooking and shopping in our family, including the kids, after we moved to Bolinas, and I think that I was very accustomed to providing what I might now think of as care, and that it felt wonderful to provide it. I also may have got an idea in my head that that was what care was: it was something that one did for other people.
Once, when I was ten or so, I arrived home from the school’s backpacking week in the Sierra Nevada very early in the morning, dropped off at the house in the dark at perhaps 4 AM.
I didn’t want to wake anyone, so I went into the kitchen and baked biscuits, all ready and hot when the others woke up an hour or two later. And that might have something to do with it all.
One can see how that combination of generosity and freedom might get a bit confused, how one might come to see it as meaning not only that care is something that one gives other people, but also that to give care for oneself would be inappropriate — contrary to the idea of what care is — or selfish.
Even worse: it could be carried further yet. Caring for oneself — by which I don’t mean just indulgence, or just self-protection, but the actual caring part of care — could come to seem like giving up on the possibility that one might matter enough be cared for by someone else.
It might even come to seem like the ultimate proof that one does not matter to anyone else.
No wonder one might shy away from it, under those circumstances.
But where does indulgence come in, in that case? A reader who responded to the Milosz essay mentioned that the idea of self-care is popular just now, and that generally it seems to refer to indulgence. After she said it, I saw the phrase everywhere; and everywhere I saw it, it was used to refer to indulgence, not in a larger context of care for the self, that is, not as an element of care in a larger picture of overall well-being, but as if it were the same as care.
I think therefore that the kind of conflation that drew me to write this essay is not only a product of the kind of freedom and independence of a hippie childhood, but perhaps something more widespread.
And yet: there is a passage in Elizabeth Strout’s novel Lucy by the Sea that bothered me at the time that I read it, and has continued to bother me ever since. It’s short, so I’ll share it in its entirety.
The main character in the novel is telling her adult daughter why she chose to have an affair many years before. She says:
“I went out for dinner with a woman I had met years earlier. She was one of the saddest women I have ever known. She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and God knows she would have told me if she had. She was sad, Chrissy, she was damaged in some fundamental way; she had never had a day of therapy, she just lived her life as a tax attorney, and we went out to dinner that night, and then I realised that she probably was an alcoholic. She had at least a bottle of wine that night, and a martini to start off with, and then -- Are you listening?”
But I could tell that she was. She was watching me with real interest on her face. She nodded.
“And then, for dessert, she ordered these special-made doughnuts that came with chocolate sauce you could dip them in, and as I watched her dipping these doughnuts in this chocolate sauce I felt such a sense -- I guess a sense of fear -- because I was in the presence of such deep loneliness. And I thought, Yes, I am going to have that affair.
“And so I went home and wrote him just the word Yes. And he was ecstatic. And that was that.”3
I find that just as I reject the notion that indulgence is the same as care, I also reject the notion that the novel — I read it as the novel, not just the character — is proposing in these paragraphs. These paragraphs seem to say that the true sign of an unbearable loneliness isn’t the alcoholism, or the solitude, but the indulging in the small luxury of the dessert at the table.
On reading it I wanted to push back against that, to say that one could write the same scene to show a living pleasure in the small indulgence; to say, that is a good thing, a reaching out towards enjoying the world as it is.
I want to say, I think, that when we care for people, including ourselves, we say that they matter.
And that care decides that indulgence is good sometimes, and less good other times, and that because the person being cared for matters — even if it is oneself — then one does that balancing, makes that decision.
Please, take care of yourself, and of others. It’s such a wonderful part of being human.
Many thanks to
, , , , , , , , , , , , , Mil Bil and for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.
Lucy by the Sea: A Novel, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2022, at p.269.
I am married to a man who is capable of such intense absorption in a project that he forgets to eat until late afternoon, when he is suddenly ravenous. He would never let a guest go hungry. Until I read this, I hadn’t seen this peculiar habit for what it is, a lack of self-care.
Very thought-provoking. I love your definition of care— doing the thing that contributes to present and future well-being with the same tenderness and attention you’d do for another. I wondered about that passage: was it the dessert after all the other indulgence, not in and of itself, that was so sad? But also: the woman’s answer does seem to reinforce the idea that it’s superior to include another, rather than to care for one’s own present and future well-being directly. Fascinating!