Wake-Up Call To Slow Down

I have a very good life. Unfortunately, sometimes I feel I have five or six of them going simultaneously.

There’s the writer and the public speaker, with deadlines, calls to return, mail to answer, speeches to prepare, talks to give and monthly New England Speakers Association meetings to attend.

There’s the wife who shares her husband’s passions, spending a month of Wednesday nights at the Science Museum’s Lowell Lectures on Astronomy. My latest birthday present to him was my promise to watch the 14 hourlong videos of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” with him.

There’s the member of a family, who baby-sits each grandchild every week, who’s going to Richmond, Va., with her husband to help her younger daughter and her son-in-law move back to New England, who’s spending a weekend with her sister on the Cape, and who loves having her extended family celebrate the holidays at her house.

There’s the community member, who’s active in her church; who belongs to a book group; who’s committed to supporting a young woman who once was homeless; who gives time and energy, as well as money, to charitable causes.

There’s the individual, who’s trying to fit in an hour a day of exercise, who’s always keeping appointments with her dentist, her chiropractor and everyone else in her maintenance program; who’s responsible for a car, her plants, a dog, the birds at her feeder and now a temperamental giant pumpkin seedling; who shops and cleans house and entertains, who tries to keep in touch with a network of friends, and who dreams (mostly, it seems, in vain) of finding time to publish a second collection of her columns.

My days are measured by lists, my weeks run by schedule. I take this juggling act for granted and often feel, even as I fall into bed exhausted, that I love my life.

Then I got a cold I couldn’t shake.

I still showed up in the right places at the right time, though I felt like a ghost of my former self. I experienced my daily routine as a near-death march, which was grinding my soul into a nub: Why in the world am I so busy? Why is there no time to rest, no time to play, no room for a spontaneous impulse in this life I’m leading? What is the point of all this activity? In their book, “Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life,” Richard Leider and David Shapiro comment that most of us go through “periodic wake-up calls when we feel we are carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders.”

My sense of being overwhelmed by my own appetite for life does seem to come in waves. I retrench. I recommit. I cut back. Then I take on new responsibilities. When I have free time, everything new and interesting beckons. When I’m overscheduled, these same delightful undertakings become a source of pressure and anxiety.

I experience a strange inner splitting. When I can attend only to the demands of the world, even those I’ve chosen, I lose touch with the creative energy and excitement inside me. I’m so intent on running myself, I shut myself off to the voices of my true desires. When I rushed outside with a camera to take a picture of the daffodils and grape hyacinths blooming along the far wall of our yard the other day, I had to remind myself to take an extra minute to actually see them.

On the other hand, when I do have time on my hands, I often feel vaguely distressed, uneasy and at a loss. But of what?

Stephan Rechtschaffen, in his book, “Timeshifting: Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life,” says we’re trying to escape from feeling, that in those rare moments of stillness when we sense our own anxiety, or sadness, or loneliness, we busy ourselves, terrified we’ll be overwhelmed if we listen to the cries of our deeper self. Yet, he insists, a slower pace is essential for anyone wishing to come alive.

As the school year winds down, I’ll hit a lull in my activity level again, and this time I won’t pile appointments, like rocks, on the lid of my own Pandora’s box.

This time, I’ll let what will fly out into my life.

xxxx