Go, Go, Go…

I move at 100mph.

It’s how we grew up, my two sisters and I. It’s great for making trains, raking leaves and being shower-ready in five minutes. It’s also excellent for blowing past inconvenient emotions, sidestepping introspection and circumnavigating presence.

Were the three of us biogenetically born to be A-type and slightly neurotic?

I doubt it. But, it has made us ambitious, achievement-oriented and able to power through everything from dinner dishes to death.

However, there are serious side effects.

Sometimes, I get this racy feeling.

Not like I want to wear lacy lingerie. More like my heart may finally pound its way out of my chest.

It’s a frantic feeling. Like I may explode, or come unglued or break into a million pieces. Like Humpty Dumpty on crack. There is no singular trigger. No last straw that can be stuffed back where it came from.

It’s cumulative.

AND (this is the part I have trouble remembering) it cannot be solved by running even faster to prevent the illusionary walls of control from crashing down.

Because… there are no walls.

This chronic occasionally overwhelming anxiety that we can’t keep it together is a kind of culturally endorsed craziness.

The faster we go, the more we do. The more we do, the more powerful we feel. The more powerful we feel, the more invincible we think we are, until… we hit the wall.

This would seem like the perfect opportunity to just get right up and keep running.

BUT, it’s not.

BECAUSE, the manic efficiency is usually about things we don’t even really want to do. Certainly not things that feed our spirit, warm our heart or make us alive. And what do we get for this sacrifice? The big reward? Drum roll…

The opportunity to do it again!

This causes all form of breakdowns.

We can medicate our despair pharmaceutically. Numb it with chocolate. Drown it in wine. Or exhaust it with marathons.

But, eventually, it catches up.

It’s like the adult Boogeyman.

As a child, he hid under the bed. Now, he lurks in the quiet of downtime. Elusive, insidious– a shape-shifting embodiment of guilt, fear, self-doubt and that horrible feeling that something is terribly wrong.

So who IS the Boogeyman?

Me. You. Us.

Where does that racy about to hit the wall feeling come from?

It’d be easy to point to our culture of bloated expectations and accomplishment-driven multi-tasking. But I try, often after considerable whining, to revert back to my I AM philosophy.

I am the problem. And I am the solution.

As ungratifying as this usually is on the front end, it more than makes up for it on the back. So, although almost every single time I begin by thinking: Nope, not this time! This time it’s definitely NOT me… it always is.

I am always the Boogeyman I’m trying to escape.

In the case of this racy, out-of-control, going-to-hit-the-wall feeling, it’s because I’ve given up on myself.

Self-abandonment is the problem. And self-connection is the answer.

How?

Two words. Slow down.

Sounds obvious and a bit facile. But I mean it in a different way than we’re used to talking about. My mom explained this to me while I was running in Nantucket a year after she’d passed away.

Her spirit said, SLOW DOWN. I laughed.

“Like my running pace?” I asked. “No”, she said, “Slow down your thoughts… and your feelings… until you know what they are.”

It blew my world.

We all think about WHAT we’re going to do as a prerequisite warm-up to ‘the doing’ part. BUT, do we think about WHY?

I usually don’t. I’m in such a hurry to just get it all done, I go on automatic pilot. I think this saves me time. But, it actually just insures I’ll do ten times what I want to do. And possibly not even the one thing I did want to do.

Sometimes, it requires radical acts of defiance.

Picture this.

I let all the spinning plates crash to the ground. Oops. I look ruefully around at the enormous mess. Shame. And I walk away. Beneath a pink canopy of pure possibility.

Feels WAY more powerful.