Is There Life Without Overwhelm?

I sure hope so, but you'll find no three-step solution here

A couple Sundays ago, I had to swing by Lowe’s after church to pick up some gardening stuff I’d ordered. When I got there, I pulled into a curbside pickup spot and saw that they were asking people to check in via the Lowe’s app. After downloading it and navigating several screens, I found that because I’d bought the supplies from my computer and checked out as “guest,” the app couldn’t actually register my order. I drove frustrated donuts around that technological cul de sac until finally calling the store: “Speak to a person!!”

Later that day I was working with my 16-year old on getting registered for a summer class at the community college. We managed to decipher the byzantine online registration procedures without benefit of decoder rings; more apps to download, multiple logins and passwords, and several forms. (We later found out we missed two additional forms, including something to be notarized.)

Then that evening I had to complete the intake paperwork for an orthopedist appointment scheduled for the next day. Screen after screen of questions. Take a photo of your insurance card and upload it. Scrawl an electronic signature.

I’m going to suppress the inner critic’s voice, calling me a baby for what I’m about to say: this made for an overwhelming day, and I was a jangle of nerves by bedtime. And it’s not like I’d even done the gardening, taken the college class, attended the appointment. I hadn’t really “done” anything! This was all just… existing in the world. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s cool that someone will lug heavy bags of topsoil right to my trunk. Online college registration sure beats standing in line at a registrar’s office, praying you brought all the right documents with you. And I was in and out at the ortho in 25 minutes, including an X-ray, without touching a single clipboard. A fairly straightforward diagnosis of tendonitis in my shoulder, plus impingement.

But I made my first physical therapy appointment yesterday, and in the 17 hours since scheduling it, I’ve already gotten four emails and texts. 

It’s all too much. 

When I took Sociology of Gender in college, we read a book about how labor-saving devices such as washing machines and microwaves were touted as ways to make the work of homemaking easier. But instead we filled that time with even more tasks as we chased ever-growing standards of productivity. I think about that book all the time and its implications for women, and for everyone. Our time-saving devices don’t seem to be leading us into greater leisure and freedom.

Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.” We’re not evolutionarily equipped for: notifications of breaking news; constant availability, with expectations from everyone of a prompt response; podcasts that automatically download onto our devices with implied urgency; hours spent on screens, perky videos nestled alongside photos of heartbreak half a world away.

I quit most social media two years ago and am so glad to be done with it. I miss the people, but not the vibe. It wasn’t so much the shiny, well-curated artifice that finally did me in, nor the unproductive arguments that raged like a wildfire and persuaded no one. It was simply the noise, noise, noise, noise:

Every year at Christmas my kids would say, “Aww, the Grinch is just highly sensitive is all.”

We talk about overwhelm a lot in our household. At least two of our kids, and at least one of the parents, has some kind of diagnosis of neurodivergence, which can include dyslexia, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and other differences in mental processing. A lot of neurodivergence includes feelings of sensory overload, although anyone can get overloaded. 

And I’d argue that in our modern world—a world that’s barreling along “beyond human scale,” to use Brene Brown’s phrase—many of us walk around in a state of frequent, if not perpetual, dysregulation. Because this heightened state keeps us in our lizard brain, it’s really no wonder we’re killing the planet, fighting perpetual wars, dabbling with authoritarianism, and generally demonizing and scapegoating each other. We can’t think creatively in this heightened state. What we can do is consume more and more stuff—goods, services, information—in a futile effort to self-medicate. And we can maintain the fiction that perpetual activity is the human norm, starting with schooling kids all day and then giving them hours of homework each night. 

Why does the world ask so much of us, and yet also so little?
And why do we do it to ourselves?

…I wrote the above on Thursday morning, then put the article away for a while. This is where I’d normally pivot to some wrapping-up thoughts: suggested approaches, practices, ways forward. But honestly, I had nothing. 

The first thing I did after this stuckness was my weekly scheduled phone call with my accountability friend. We laughed at the absurdity of the constant texts, and more tasks than time—a rigged game it’s impossible to win. As we talked, I walked “with” her to the garden and piled manure compost into hills around my potato plants while she scooped her dog’s poop as the two of them made their way around the neighborhood. There was something right about meeting shit with shit.

Other offerings came. Like this:

h/t The Half Marathoner

And the meeting with my coach in which she stopped me mid-session and asked me to close my eyes and breathe—something we’ve never done before, carried along as we usually are by the excited bubbling of our conversation. 

And then the hour in the car with my middle kid, who turned on Tortured Poets Department and cranked it up … probably in a preemptive move not to have to Talk To Mom, but the music got me out of my head. 

And by the end of the day, I was prepared again, for the small and large things that defy preparation.

Last week I heard someone quote Paula D’Arcy, who said, “God comes to us disguised as our lives.” The internet tells me it might also be Richard Rohr… another example of how a simple thing is not a simple thing. How do I give proper credit to this quote? But its complicated provenance need not get in the way of profound truth. 

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you living beyond human scale? What is the Great Whatever, disguised as your life, telling you about that?

~

What I’m Up To

I’m preaching this Sunday, May 12 at 10:15 a.m. at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Herndon and via livestream.  

And I’m coming to North Carolina for a church leader event in two weeks, and will be leading a women’s retreat at the end of May.

Steady on.