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The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequateto the stormy present. . . .As our case is new, so we must think anewand act anew.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1

Facing the Mountain of Too Much

“It's too much,” Mary Helen told me, “way too much. I just can't deal with it all!” Then she gave in to tears. Mary Helen, a successful and intelligent woman of thirty-eight, with a thriving career and a loving family, was close to the end of her rope.

Any observer in my counseling office that day would clearly have seen that Mary Helen was in trouble: anxious, stressed, unfocused, irritable, unable to sleep, overwhelmed by life, and frustrated with her inability to manage it. She was angry at herself for her inability to cope and angry at me because I was the one to whom she had admitted it.

Although she was not aware of it, she did know what the problem was. It was the first thing she said: “too much.” Upon further exploration, I found no underlying psychosis, no debilitating personality disorder, no family-of-origin dysfunction making a sudden midlife appearance, nor a marriage about to crash on the rocks of incompatibility. Just that life had become too much.

Just that life had become too much? Hardly. Although the problem may seem well known, its vastness, depth, and long-term implications are still far from our conscious recognition. As with any hidden enemy, the contemporary problem of too much has its way with all of us. The damage is extremely severe and is sometimes even life threatening.

Do you sometimes feel like Mary Helen, overwhelmed or emotionally numbed by the pace and sheer quantity of life? Are you reluctantly prevented by your overloaded schedule from keeping your true priorities? Do you feel unable to do all the things you need to do and still have time for yourself? Have you come to realize that it's been too long since you've enjoyed real, satisfying, and regular leisure? If so, you've found the right book.

Do you have a desire to give more attention to the spiritual aspects of your life—your truly important meanings and values— but have been frustrated in trying to transform that desire into a real practice? You will find nourishment here.

Or have you been frustrated with complicated, time-consuming, or impractical systems of meditation and slowing down that don't really work for you? You can anticipate success through the suggestions found in this book.

Most of us in this hurry-up, e-mail world of instant response are feeling the same sense of overload that my client Mary Helen felt. Indeed, the primary challenge to successful human life in the postmodern, millennial world is the challenge of too much: too much to do; too much to cope with; too much distraction; too much noise; too much demanding our attention; or, for many of us, too many opportunities and too many choices. Too much of everything for the time and energy available.

We all have been feeling, at least on a subliminal level, the choices, demands, and complexities of life increase with every passing year. We have more to be, more to do, more places to go, and more things we want or need to accomplish. But the day remains twenty-four hours; the year, the same twelve months. The amount of activity constantly increases, but both the amount of time into which it must fit and the human energy with which it must be met, at best, remain the same.

Even though my client Mary Helen named her problem— “It's way too much. I just can't deal with it all”—she didn't recognize it, first, as something very serious and, second, as something new. Rather, she saw it just as one more of life's irritations that she should be able to deal with. This attitude reveals a key characteristic of the problem of too much: It passes itself off as something it is not. It says, “I am the same old problem you have been dealing with all your life, you can handle me.” But the reality is that we can't—and believing we can is part and parcel of the problem.

Why don't we see it coming? The answer is as simple as it is clear: it is masquerading, and the purpose of a masquerade is to make you think it's something else. We are all like Mary Helen, saying to ourselves, “This should not be a serious problem!” Because it looks and feels like the same old problem of being just too busy and in the past we have been able to handle it with the coping strategies available to us, we miss its seriousness and power.

It's time to rip off the mask from the problem of too much and reveal the seriously damaging monster that is destroying too many lives and too many families. Modern life has become impossible to cope with in the same old ways we learned as children and young adults.

That's because the sheer amount of too much also makes it a new and essentially different challenge. Consider this for a moment, because at first it might not seem evident: Precisely because of the very large volume of the same old thing, it has become essentially different. It is not just a larger amount of the same thing, but is something entirely new.

It's like the evolution of a pile of rocks into a mountain. At some point in its history it stops being a pile of rocks and starts being a mountain. When exactly does that happen? The transition point would be difficult to determine. Does this last eruption finally make it a mountain or must we wait for one more? So it is with the problem of too much: it has become what it is over a long period of time. For most of us, the point at which too much has become a mountain is long past. What used to be a pile of rocks has become the Mountain of Too Much.

It is vital to recognize this mountain as new because it is the newness that signifies the need for different coping strategies to conquer it. The tools needed to conquer a pile of rocks are very different from those demanded by a mountain. So it is as we face the Mountain of Too Much. A sturdy pair of shoes is sufficient for a pile of rocks, but an imposing peak demands carabiners, belaying systems, and training in specific skills.

Mary Helen, my bright, normally fun-loving and competent client, was truly puzzled. “Why can't I deal with this? I have always been able to cope, even when things have been difficult. Why not now?” But this was a new and challenging mountain, not just the same old pile of rocks she had walked over many times before. But that was what she needed to see.

So it is with all of us—we keep dealing with the problem of too much in the same old ways we learned before the pile of rocks became a mountain. As a result, we are overstressed, overloaded, overtired, and unable to solve the serious problems and challenges that are a direct result of our revved-up pace of life. It's time to learn a different way to face our Mountain of Too Much and to trade in our old ways of coping for new ones.