Years ago, I heard author Rob Bell tell a story that I have never forgotten. He had an accident while water skiing and sustained a severe concussion. During the most intense phase of the concussion, Rob explained that his brain would only allow him to be with what was most immediate—what was in this exact moment. Everyone around him saw the concussion as this awful disruption, this terrible thing that had happened to Rob. But Rob didn’t experience the concussion that way. Instead, he noticed the most inexplicable gift. For a little while, his brain would not let him worry about the future or ruminate about the past. He could only be with what was here—and what he discovered was that here is breathtaking.
There was a new depth of wonder and awe that often left him speechless. He found himself tearing up at the sight of his children, and he felt emotions at a level he had never experienced before. In the unexpected disruption of his life through this concussion, Rob was able to experience everyday, ordinary moments as overwhelmingly beautiful.
I was thinking about Rob Bell’s story again this week, and how the concussion miraculously gave him the gift of the present moment. He literally could not scan ahead with worry or anticipation. He had to remain in the moment he was standing in. It made me think of when I was a teenager and my dad did his best to teach me that same lesson.
Our family had just finished a trip to Disney World and we were driving home from to North Carolina. I was just seventeen years old, and, as we crossed from Florida into Georgia, my dad asked me to drive. The sun had just set and I was so nervous to drive our family on Interstate 95 in the dark. My dad assured me I could do it.
As I pulled out of the rest stop onto the interstate, I immediately turned on my high beam headlights because I wanted to see farther down the road. My mind wanted to be certain of every possible scenario that might arise between Georgia and our home in North Carolina.
It seemed that if I could see more road, we would all be safer. If I could somehow push the light farther into the darkness, then maybe I would know what was coming and I could relax a little.
But my dad quickly told me to turn the high beams off because I would blind the drivers coming toward us in the southbound lanes. And then he said something so simple, with the kind of ease and confidence that only made sense because he had driven roads like this a thousand times before: “Missy, your regular headlights are all you need. They give you exactly the amount of road you need to see in order to keep us safe. Just keep your focus on whatever you can see inside that cone of light and you’ll be okay.”
There were hundreds of miles of road ahead of us that I could not see, and there was something in me that still believed more visibility would make me safer. I wanted more information, more certainty, more road. But my dad continue to reassure me: You do not need enough light for the entire drive home. You need just enough light for this stretch, and then the next stretch would appear, and then the next one after that.
I trusted my dad, and even though I could only see 150 feet in front of my car, I relaxed. I knew we were OK.
The whole road was never meant to be illuminated at once.
I think we have been taught to spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to turn on the high beam headlights in our lives.
We want to know what will happen next, how thing will turn out. We want to know what the test results will say, whether our child will be okay, whether the money will work out, whether the symptom will go away, and whether the decision we are making is the right one. We look into the darkness beyond what we can see and think, “If I could see further into the future and have a little more certainty—maybe even a guarantee—then I’d be OK.”
And I think this is where we can begin to see the idea of overwhelm through a very different lens than the one we inherited from our culture.
Sometimes there really is a LOT going on. A LOT of appointments, a LOT of responsibilities, a LOT people needing something from us, and a LOT of decisions arriving all at once.
That top layer can be totally real. The zero bank balance can be real. The diagnosis can be real. The repossessed card can be real. The dissolution of the marriage can be real.
We don’t need to argue with that top layer. What if seeing THAT it’s just the top layer can begin to make a really big difference in our experience of life?
What if we can swim down just a bit, and discover an entire other current flowing underneath?
Somewhere beneath all of those top-layer details that appear to be causing our sense of overwhelm, there is usually a much deeper set of conditioned beliefs cleverly clouding our vision. Whether we are aware of the deeper beliefs or not, when there is overwhelm, there is usually something like this running more deeply in the system: I need to anticipate what might go wrong. I need to make the right decision. I need to make sure I do not disappoint anyone. I need to protect the people I love. I need to stay far enough ahead of Life that nothing happens that I have not already mentally prepared myself to handle.
Overwhelm is what it feels like when I am trying to manage not only what is happening, but also every possible future version of what could happen. I must be sure to never have an experience my mind has learned to call unbearable, unsafe, painful, disappointing, or wrong. It becomes my job to make sure I never face what our culture calls a crisis or a catastrophe or even an uncomfortable circumstance.
And no wonder my whole system gets exhausted. That is an impossible assignment.
I innocently step into a place where “I can help” quietly becomes “this is on me,” and where “I care deeply” becomes “I have to hold all of this together,” and where responsibility becomes almost indistinguishable from trying to control Life.
And the funny thing is, because of my cultural conditioning, I still fall into this little trap sometimes. There are days when it feels as though everything really does depend on me. And honestly, when this happens, it doesn’t feel like I am trying to control life! It feels like I am being responsible.
And THAT is what makes it all so convincing.
Thankfully, the sheer discomfort of believing all of that nonsense becomes unbearable. And I am SO grateful for those wake-up sensations in my body. Somewhere in the tension and the contraction, a tiny little space opens and I can see it: “Right now, I am not seeing clearly. I am viewing my circumstances through a faulty lens.”
And, in that tiny space of waking up from my mind’s hypnotic trance, I can see more clearly what is happening: I am trying to manage and control something that is not mine to manage and control.
My mind is doing its best to convince me that I need to prevent certain experiences from happening in order for me to be OK—that there are experiences I simply CANNOT have. There are outcomes I MUST avoid at all costs. There are disruptions I must protect myself from because, if one of those things happens, I am no longer OK.
And of course these false beliefs create enormous pressure in the body.
If my okayness depends on Life unfolding within a narrow range of acceptable outcomes, then I have an awful lot of work to do.
I think about Morgan—my client whose story I have shared with you before.
For years, she believed whole-heartedly that there was one specific worst-case-scenario that she simply could never allow to happen to her. She worked so hard to ensure she’d never have to face her mind’s worst nightmare: falling from a horse and getting seriously injured.
And then one day, astonishingly, that thing actually happened. She fell from her horse, the horse landed on top of her, and her legs were crushed. And what followed could be described by most people as painful and terrifying.
And yet when Morgan talks about that experience, that is not at all how she reports it. She describes the slow-motion of it all, the gentleness, the deep peace that made absolutely no sense in the moment. And in hindsight, she can see so clearly how the experience changed the way she understands herself. Something within her widened, expanded. She discovered a resilience within her that her mind had never allowed her to imagine. And, somewhere in the messy process of living through what her mind had once called the worst thing that could happen, she began to trust Life in a way she had never trusted it before.
The difficult thing happened. And yet, the experience that once represented the loss of her okayness became part of the very ground from which a deeper okayness grew.
Maybe this is one of the strangest things about being human.
We can spend enormous amounts of energy arranging our lives so that we never have to encounter certain experiences while having no idea who we might discover ourselves to be if one of those experiences actually happens.
And this is where Rob Bell’s story comes back in for me.
Rob went on to describe how it seems to him that there can be an unexpected perfection inside the very things we call crises, challenges, and unmet expectations. Somehow, disruption has a way of changing our lifelong perspective about who we are and what is important.
Rob said that whenever he meets people who seem especially awake to Life, he finds himself asking them, “When and how did you suffer?” Because somewhere along the way, something had to disrupt the status quo deeply enough to begin loosening the old way of seeing.
There are moments when the very experience we work so hard to prevent arrives anyway, and somewhere in the living through it, we discover that our mind’s original prediction was incomplete.
The painful thing may still be painful. The loss may still be a loss. We may be afraid, heartbroken, exhausted, disappointed, angry, or changed forever by what happened.
But what begins to fall away is an old, habitual belief system that says discomfort means I am not okay.
What if okayness is so much larger than comfort?
This is why I so often say, “Comfort is no longer our North Star.” It’s not because I don’t love comfort. I absolutely do!
It’s because comfort, by comparison, is SO small when something as miraculous as waking up from the mind’s trance is on offer. It’s like choosing crumbs on the floor when there is a royal banquet table right next to it.
What if we could swim down just enough to ask the questions beneath the experience of overwhelm (and please remember, when we ask questions like these, we are not searching our mind’s database for answers. We simply ask the questions to stir something deep in the water):
What am I working so hard to prevent?
What experience do I believe I cannot handle having?
I am grateful for that fateful drive home from Disney World all those decades ago. The darkness beyond the headlights was never a problem. I was offered an exercise in trusting what my mind desperately wanted to control but couldn’t. It was never my job.
There is such a relief in the body when we wake up, even just 2% to the hypnotic effect of the mind when it demands that we hold it all together. That we accomplish all the tasks. That we rescue everything that appears to need rescuing.
Ironically, in this space of relief, in this absence of pressure, action is simply taken. Maybe not in the exact timing our mind prefers, but the metaphorical water does seem to run much more smoothly and abundantly through the garden hose when the kinks are removed—when the pressure is seen for the false story it is.
What if it was never my job to hold it altogether—to figure it all out?
What if I can touch that space of true wellbeing and peace in this moment, before one more thing is accomplished?