September 2021 E-News

Moving Beyond Overwhelm

"The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away."

—Joy J. Golliver

Greetings!

I nominate ‘Overwhelmed’ as the word of the year. It is what I hear in people’s voices. It is what I feel myself so often.

We know the public list of woes: climate, politics, pandemic, immigration and other forms of human suffering. We don’t know each other’s challenges, but they haven’t gone away just because our collective issues are so many. It is a lot. And unless our house is burning, it is a little hard to know what to do, or how to help. But overwhelm doesn’t do any good for anyone—either ourselves or the needs of the world. How do we move from overwhelm to a kind of engagement that fits our lives?

Here are three ideas taken from our recent LumZoom event on this topic (due to popular demand, we are going to repeat this event a couple of times—see below for dates).

1) Calling

Listen for and follow your call. You can’t address all the issues, but one or two might have your name on them. As Marjory Bankson has written, “call has to do with discovering our particular field of action or the part of God’s realm that is ours to tend at any given time.”

2) Small Steps

Big problems require small steps. Break it down into doable things. The poet David Whyte writes:

Start right now take a small

step you can call your own

don’t follow someone else’s heroics,

be humble and focused, start close in,

don’t mistake that other for your own.

Start close in, don’t take the second step

or the third, start with the first thing close in,

the step you don’t want to take.

3) Hold it Lightly

We all could learn a thing or two from those activists who have been at it a long time.

In his letter to a young activist, Thomas Merton reminded his friend to not depend on the hope of results.

"When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself."

If you are feeling a little overwhelmed these days, and even if you aren’t, I hope you can join one of our upcoming LumZooms on this topic (see below).

Taking the Wheel

She looks like me, brown hair, dark eyes, about 5’5” give or take a millimeter up or down. She steps in when I feel stuck, unsure, overwhelmed. She tells me to pull back a moment, turn down the noise, watch the rain. She ‘s been with me from the beginning, my inside voice, my alter ego.

I’ve never been easygoing—feeling more like a soda can explosion than a warm glass of milk. But when I hear the gut ripping stories of those who died and lost loved ones on September 11, the unimaginable plight of Afghan women and others desperate to leave their country, or the Delta variant on a rampage of human destruction, I want to re-write history, past and present, put my mark on it and obliterate injustice.

That’s when my alter ego takes the wheel, steering me away from the speed bumps and the potholes of withering despair. She reminds me that small acts of kindness have enormous impact. So I call a friend, make a donation, give blood, wave to someone I don't know, volunteer for a cause, express gratitude to a person I've never thanked before, pray.

I don’t know what burdens others may carry inside of them. I can only try to make things a little easier, loosen the straps a bit, and thank them for helping me move beyond my overwhelm.

Alice Barbera