It’s a new month and time for a new virtue: frugality. Here’s how our friend Ben Franklin defined it:

“Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.”

Most people associate frugality with money. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to explore a currency with which I personally have a far greater struggle stewarding: emotional energy.

When I was a young actor, my day job was working as a clerk at an elite university where I had the opportunity to do some career counseling. Among other things, I took a Meyers-Briggs test and learned that I’m an introvert. I had sort of informally known that about myself, but that counselor told me that in all the years she’d been a counselor, she thought I may have had the highest score on the introversion scale she’d ever seen.

Of course, lots of people are introverts and you can certainly take personality profiling with a grain of salt, but before I took that assessment and spoke with that counselor, I had never given any thought to how I manage my emotional energy. As a result, I was chronically exhausted and depressed.

By now I’ve learned that the bucket in my emotional energy well is pretty small and needs to be refilled often. But I still feel guilty about prioritizing my own needs over the expectations of others; particularly the expectations of people I love dearly. And lately, the dumpster-fire vitriol we’re all living in has me feeling like my tiny bucket keeps getting knocked over before I can get it halfway up the well.

The most efficient coping fuel for my bucket is solitude, which is articulated beautifully in Mary Oliver’s poem “How I Go to the Woods”:

In the spirit of affixing my own oxygen mask before I assist others, I’m going to begin my practice of frugality by being a better steward of my emotional energy. Specifically, I’m committing to recharging my resources each morning before I begin my work by meditating for 10 minutes. I may not be able to be alone in the woods like Thoreau and Oliver suggest as often as I’d like—I don’t have Thoreau’s mother to do my laundry and make sure I’m eating, but I can at least attempt to carve out a few minutes to create solitude in my own mind.

What wasteful expenses do you make? Continue the conversation in the comments below or on Facebook.  

* Yes, I understand that the Icarus Swam blog plumbs works of fiction for wisdom and that Walden is—horror of horrors—nonfiction. But Thoreau knew a thing or two about managing introversion. Plus, I’ve been obsessed with him and his delightful quirkiness since I was in high school, so he gets a pass.

Notes:

Image: Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

1. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods and “Civil Disobedience”. Signet, 1980. p. 30

2. Oliver, Mary. “from Swan 2010.”  Devotions: the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. Penguin Press, 2017.