When you are overwhelmed with life as it appears to you, I ask you: “Who is overwhelmed? Is life the Doer in this case? Or, do you think I am the Doer Who insists that you be overwhelmed?” It seems to be that he or she who is overwhelmed is the overwhelmer.
Your arms are full. Your head is full of responsibility. Granted, the load you carry is too much for you. If you were carrying lumber and couldn’t carry a thousand pounds across a bridge, you would lessen the burden you are carrying. You would leave some and go back to make a second trip of it. On a simple physical level, solutions are easier for you. You would not demand yourself to carry too much all at once. You would not feel that you are irresponsible to lay down your burden for a while and find another way to handle it.
The weight you carry now is a story you have told yourself. You box yourself in. On the psychological level, you may have a great sense of not only responsibility that belongs to you but also a great sense of urgency. In addition, you have imposed urgency upon yourself. You are, indeed, responsible for your sense of urgency. Urgency is the frosting on the cake of your overwhelm. Urgency is overwhelming and not really the responsibility itself.
How do your sense of urgency and your processing it help you? Not at all!
Urgency and overwhelm are your way of crying out: “Woe is me. All this is too much for me. I cannot do all this.”
You diagnose yourself with an overwhelming diagnosis and, therefore, overwhelm yourself. You have added this weight to yourself, the same way as when you overeat, you may gain, and then bemoan that you are gaining weight.
You may say in both cases that you can’t help it. Who, dear ones, is going to help? Perhaps you are still waiting in life for a genie to appear?
You culminate the weight of burden, and so you are the one necessary to give yourself a break from overwhelming burden. Everything may stay the same. The same difficulties may pursue you, yet you are the one to release the sense of overwhelm. Overwhelm is not your forte.
Why give away so much of your energy into non-productive fluttering around going nowhere? Wow, use that wasted worry energy, and you would have everything you are overwhelmed with off your shoulders by now. In effect, you compromised yourself.
It can also happen that the weight you carry is made of situations that are not under your direct control and you cannot cross off your list. For example, let’s say your overwhelm is about an accident or illness that has occurred in your immediate family. The weight on you is grief. It is easy to say that you have to let go of the grief, yet grief is overwhelming to you and seems to leave only in its own time anyway.
Consider it this way: When you have a job, you have to be at work at 8 a.m. Whether it is easy for you or not to get at work on time, you get yourself there. If you want to keep your job, you get to work on time every morning.
In the case of grief, you will come to function fully in the world. Give yourself some leeway, and then get back to working on your life and your love for life.
In every case, you take the next step and the next and the next.
What is your real responsibility? Grief or life?
When you have young children, you are required to meet each day regardless of the state your heart is in. Even when you have a headache, you simply take care of your children without question.
Your True Being carries you through. Everyone has True Being. Sight unseen, True Being is still True Being. Sooner or later, you will make it across the bridge. Make it sooner.