Rushing recovery and failing the marshmallow test

I simply didn’t like being told ‘no’ even by my own body.

Mica Gray

Mica Gray is a wellbeing practitioner working in adult mental health. She is training to be a counselling psychologist.

A crutch is held in the hand of someone in pyjamas.

Towfiqu Barbhuiya on Unsplash.

For most of my life, I’ve identified as someone who would fail the marshmallow test—the famous experiment testing delayed gratification in children. In this test kids are presented with a marshmallow and told that if they don’t eat it and wait for ten minutes, they can have a second one. Like those kids who couldn’t wait for the second marshmallow, I rarely want to wait for things in life. And this desire for immediacy has been amplified by our culture of microwave meals and next-day deliveries. Within our convenience culture, this desire for immediacy finds itself at home. However, when recovering from recent surgery I found myself frustrated with the idea of waiting to heal. I wanted my recovery delivered quickly, like an Amazon package, so I could return to normal life.

But rushing through healing can come at a high cost. Studies show that athletes who return too soon after injury face a 60 per cent higher risk of further issues, and patients who resume normal activities before their bodies are ready suffer more complications, anxiety, and delayed healing. Though I was fortunate enough not to feel external pressure to rush back to work, I realised the real force pushing me to get back into normal life was pride. I simply didn’t like being told ‘no’ even by my own body. Furthermore, I didn’t like the feeling of being helpless and not in control of my own life - the feeling of appearing weak in the world.

Surgery humbled me, forcing me to admit that I am in fact weak and not in control. It invited me to surrender—to doctors, to my body, to friends, family and to the process as a whole. As I meditated on an ancient wisdom, from the Bible, “Patience is better than pride,” I found truth in it. Patience helped me recognize what pride didn’t; the strength of my body and the abundance of love and support around me.

In trying to rush back into normal life I was forcing my body beyond its capability and falling into the trap of believing that weakness is a shameful thing - rather than just part of our natural human experience. In waiting, I’ve experienced a deeper appreciation for my body, my community, and the gifts of rest and healing. These things are as sweet as a second marshmallow. If life is asking you to slow down and make space for recovery, lean into it. Set the boundaries you need and trust the process. From someone coming out on the other side, I can say it’s worth it.

Article

Comment

Leading

Politics

12 September 2024

4 min read

From Blair and Britpop to Starmer and the Oasis comeback: why character, not personality, matters

We get both the leaders and entertainers we deserve.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tony Blair talks to a member of Oasis at a reception.

Number 10.

Last time we had a new Labour prime minister, there were no Partygate fears in Number 10. Quite the opposite. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia project threw its front door open to the likes of Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher of Oasis at a bash in 1997. Inheriting a rising economy, things for New Labour, as well as for Oasis, could only get better.

This time around, Sir Keir Starmer has “tough decisions” to make, such as trying to deny a universal winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Blair arguably never had a really tough decision to make, until his Iraq war nemesis. Since then, Oasis has turned into an unacceptable face of capitalism, as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next year turns into a Ticketmaster greed-fest of “dynamic pricing”. Diabolical pricing, more like.

Starmer and Blair both aspired to usher in an era of change and renewal. The similarity of their circumstances ends there. Nearly 30 years on, Starmer is in a different world. And the transformation of Oasis is totemic of that – from the joys of Britpop to the horrors of rip-off.

That times change is axiomatic. The nineties had busts and booms; the UK’s Black Wednesday currency crisis was of the former, the snarky underclass anthems of Oasis a paradigm of the latter. Now, in the 2020s, there are only busts. Like the note left in the Treasury drawer in 2010 joked, there really is no money left now. Except, apparently, for Oasis.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him.

An engaging question arises as to how the two Labour PMs were and are equipped spiritually for the times in which they lead. The spiritual state of Oasis is a linked matter, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Blair’s government famously didn’t “do God”, though it turned out he did privately, converting to his wife’s Roman Catholicism almost immediately after leaving office in 2007. Perhaps he had a priest hole in the family flat above Number 11. He consistently denied claims that he prayed with American president George W. Bush before or during the Iraq war.

Starmer doesn’t do God rather more formally, as a self-declared atheist. We can conclude that prayer is not a resource that he needs as he faces a more challenging immediate political future than Blair’s early days as PM. I only wish Starmer would appear in a T-shirt with the slogan “No Prayer, Like Blair”.

Arguably the spiritual life doesn’t matter for any leader. The job of PM is all about simple competence, mostly in money management. To paraphrase the pithy quip from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (on which Blair’s so strategically relied), it’s all about the economy, stupid.

So the worship is of mammon rather than God. Here the current and former PMs might care to track the career trajectory of the two Lords Gallagher of Oasis from Blair to Starmer. In 1997, they were in their pomp as authentic Mancunian working-class heroes. Today, the brothers have to make up and go back on the road to subsidise Noel’s £20million divorce settlement. A rather different demographic.

There’s perhaps no great political lesson there for political leaders, but it’s almost Faustian in its scope. See what happens when you bank only with mammon.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. It doesn’t matter, to his core vote, what he’s done or what he’s incapable of doing, Only who he is. He’s an idol, a cult image, a golden calf. Trump’s bull is sacred, whatever he does.

The UK thankfully hasn’t had one of those yet (though there were warning tremors in Boris Johnson). But it’s telling that Blair is said to have developed a messianic tendency after his premiership’s early intervention in Kosovo during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the termination of hostilities, crowds there sought to touch his clothes as he passed.

Strange that being touched should make him feel untouchable. But that’s the way of messianics. It can be the same with rock & roll stars. Live music, at its best, can offer a transcendent sense of communion. At its worst, it’s the adoration of stage idols that sends them a little mad. Or mad for it.

Oasis’s Liam Gallagher isn’t in this together with his fans anymore. He’s turned into a Marie Antoinette figure online in response to the ludicrous prices charged to watch him from Ticketmaster. He substitutes “Shut up” and “£100,000 kneeling tickets” for “Let them eat cake”.

He and his brother are warnings of what can happen in so short a period between the ascendancy of Blair and that of Starmer. True, pop stars aren’t as dangerous as someone such as Trump. But they do show us that we get both the entertainers and the leaders we deserve.