Living on Overwhelm (The American Dream)

            If days came with a theme, I’d label this one “overwhelm” …And not just for me. Here of late, it seems most everyone I talk with is living some aspect of the same, and like me, is questioning how we got here…and more important, how we get out.

            It does give pause for thought when you stop to think of just how many others are feeling it too. I mean, in my day alone, in catching up with the few I did manage to speak to today, I encountered:

            --one friend who just sold her house, with an impossible closing date and no firm clue on where she’ll be living next

            --another friend who sold his mother’s house, and now has the unenviable task of packing up/storing/selling 90 years of belongings by end of the month

            --another friend had come home to close on selling his own house when he decided he wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye (and thus made arrangements to undo a contract)

            --another friend who is awaiting cancer test results

            --another friend who says we’ll talk later as he wraps an 18 hour day of completing a website on deadline

            In other words…this is life in this 21^st century…Yours. Mine. Ours. And stress is just a part of it. It’s as American as apple pie.

Meanwhile, in between these otherwise “typical American stresses” to unwind, we flip on a TV only to find outbreaks in Iraq, murders in Syria, tornadoes in the mid west and some crazy murder trail in South Africa that is riveting, even though I don’t know any of the players and have no business watching it. In other words, for all the stress we’re already ingesting, our entertainment options are laden with stress as well, as if this is supposed to make me feel better about my own. The good news is, when comparing stresses you can always look up and find another who’d trade theirs for yours any day. Suddenly, the errands I missed, the cookbook on deadline,  and the calls I didn’t get to, pale in comparison. On the other hand, stress is stress and too much of it coming at you at once can do a number on your head, your psyche…your life.

So how’d we get in this stress mess ? Here we are, living in the land of the free with every option imaginable to support us, engage us, nurture us, and more and more, the people I talk to, the friends I check in with, are living some version of my same over-booked, over-committed, over-stressed life, only many of them are doing it with kids (and I don’t mean goats). Seriously. When did this become our norm?

There’s a great 1990s movie called Avalon wherein a close knit family of Russian Jewish immigrants moves to America to pursue the American dream. As backdrop to the timing, the family first bonds each evening over dinner, around the table, sharing experiences, telling of their day. In comes television and the family moves its sacred evening ritual from kitchen table to den, where on TV trays, they eat (still together, but no longer focused on each other, but instead, the color bar that shows up before the one program they all watch together).

With success of a family-run business, (and a little more programming) eventually the kids get their own TVs, so they now watch what they want in another room…Slowly you watch the demise of what once was a family tradition: the evening meal, desecrated by the latest technologies and newest advances, supposedly introduced to help us all out and make our lives better.

Not to dis technology (says the daily blogging girl), but it is changing us. Make no mistake. Why today alone, thanks to texts and voice mail, I was able to catch up with friends from DC, Florida, and even down the road (these were friends I literally, personally saw), I was also able to catch up via email with both East and West Coasts…and associates in China. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to email back the new friends I met last week who raise dairy goats (as it requires having a date in mind and I don’t know what will be open next week) and well…you start to see that for every “time saving” device that allows us to reach out and touch someone, there are cause and effect agents at play (meaning we get to reach back, call back, try to keep up with an ever increasing list of players…all worthy, no doubt, but seldom do we cull the list; instead, we just keep adding to (and then we wonder why we’re feeling overwhelmed).  Seems some days, there literally is not enough time to do a conversation justice, so we opt for a fleeting text or a “Catch you later” (all the while knowing later will find us every bit as busy as today).

So in addition to feeling guilty because we’re not keeping up with those we should keep up with, the real guilt comes in discovering the biggest person we’re robbing is ourselves. For when we see the day is running out of sunlight, I don't know about you, but I tend to steal from my private time reserves in order to make ends meet.

I contrast this ever growing list of time consumptors to a life like Thurman lives. (Don’t get me wrong; despite his limited technology, Thurman’s day was just as stressed, so I don’t blame technology alone, but I do think technology has lulled us into a false sense of time allocation for responding to those things being asked of us.) Thurman, with no cable, no cell phone, no access to email, has a fraction of the calls to return. Heck, if he didn’t have caller ID, it’d be Russian roulette  as to when I’d catch Thurman by phone. Still and so, Thurman’s old school. You want to talk to somebody, you call ‘em on the phone, and if they don’t answer after awhile, you go check on ‘em…Make sure they didn’t fall down or something.

Still, Thurman’s life has just as many challenges….He has stressors too. So the trick is not to blame all modern conveniences, but to recognize that these conveniences were originally designed to simplify our lives not to cram more “to do’s” into them. In my case, and especially after days like today, I’m not so sure that’s happening. Instead, I go to bed wondering if it’s too late to call so n so, as it dawns on me I forgot one message and it was somebody I really did mean to connect with.

I contend the answer lies somewhere in silence and somewhere in self discipline (of which I have relatively little these days, save for the time I’m in the garden). I ponder just how I could feel so tired, having gotten a reasonable amount (but not everything) done this day, when it hits me, I could try shortening my list (novel concept). After all, if I’m working on becoming a human being, and not a human doing, days like today leave me feeling that I didn’t even come close.

The good news is: I get to try it all over again tomorrow. (Wonder what I have to do different to net a different result? This, is the question...)