Life is "Full"...
The refrain of the month
The refrain of the month I’m hearing is “full.”
“How you doing?”
“Things are… FULL.”
Because “busy“ is no longer an honor badge to be worn, we’re struggling with a way to describe our lives that names that reality without using that word.
“Things are full“ isn’t said with pride or a sense of accomplishment. It’s said with a resignation of “that’s how my life looks and feels, and I don’t know how to make it be any other way.”
Maybe this applies more to parents who are transitioning back from summer, and into all the afterschool activities amidst a unchanging workflow. But I get the sense that as we finally totally and completely return to the “business as usual“ of the pre-pandemic era, we’re being confronted with the reality of how overstacked life really has become these days.
The need for gumption to just make it through the day today seems to exceed what one would expect.
What “full“ implies is that there’s no extra space. That every minute, every moment, is packed whether it’s with work, parenting, taking care of aging parents, cooking or cleaning or tending to other household responsibilities there’s not a lot of room to breathe. Sometimes even social engagements feel effortful.
I was in the shower the other day (yes, I do some of my best thinking in the shower), thinking about how all of our modern technologies have in a lot of ways made our lives easier. The level of physical labor required is so much less. My body does not ache from long days working on the land.
But we seemed to have replaced the physical toil with mental emotional toil.
At first, I thought, maybe it’s just human nature, and the nature of being a human is that life is hard. But as I thought of it more, I couldn’t help but sense that it’s the sociocultural structures that make our modern lives difficult.
From the way our neighborhoods are designed to the way our economy is structured, everything seems to work against what would make us truly happy and fulfilled.
The difficulty is that extracting oneself (aka escaping) doesn’t really feel like the solution either.
I think it leaves us feeling trapped. Stuck in a life that may be in many ways great, but also includes an underlying sense of “this isn’t quite how I want my life to be“.
I think we often anesthetize ourselves to this underlying feeling with things like social media, television shows, alcohol, weed, or work, or whatever your escape of choice is. Because feeling the feeling isn’t comfortable and it forces us to really consider what may be an impossible task.
The task of creating “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”
My life already feels full. How could we even begin to consider a project like that?
I think about this conundrum, and how it relates to my work quite a bit too.
If the lives we’re living generate an experience of anxiety, overwhelm, and/or depression, is it truly valuable for people to be alleviated of those uncomfortable states so that they can continue to live a life that’s not actually aligned with what’s good and right and true for them and for the Collective?
I always come back to a big YES! to that question for a number of reasons.
First, I trust where everyone is in their life and I trust that being free from pain and suffering is something everyone deserves.
I also get the sense that no one burdened by maladies is going to ever have space to take any sort of meaningful action towards change in their lives or in our collective systems.
So where does that leave us?
Well, as Dan Siegel would say, “name it to tame it.” Articulating this experience that seems to be buzzing through our communities is a first step.
Naming it also helps with the whole, “I’m not alone in this” experience. We may be siloed in our lives in so many ways. But knowing that so many of us feel isolated can be helpful. We may have beautiful friendships, but if those friendships don’t feel like a woven thread into the tapestry of lives, then there’s something disjointed in our experience of connection.
And finally an opening to the possibility: my life can be “full”, I may be “maxed”, AND I can either flow through this full life anxious or depressed or overwhelmed or I can flow through this life rooted and grounded, maybe even joyful and grateful.
And from that place, maybe there’s room to make some other tweaks.
Thank you for reading through this, I hope it created a bubble of space that made things feel less full, or at least less alone in the fullness.
Oh, and speaking of full…
I’m co-hosting a day-retreat for fathers on October 14th which you can learn more about here. (A retreat is a way of stepping away from the fullness to regroup, asses, evaluate, and return replenished).
I’m also starting another 6-month cohort of Council of Fathers in November (this is like a two hour retreat every other week for 6 months). We recorded a podcast about it with the last cohort which you can listen to here.
And if you want to create space for resourceful opening and deepening into your self and experience of self and how it all lives in your body, I highly recommend you join Livia Shapiros Somatic Therapy Workbook Guided Course. If you’re even a tiny bit curious, learn more here. It’s a kind of learning retreat into a richer experience of yourself.
And while my schedule has been booking up more quickly this fall, you can still find yourself a moment of peace here…
Warmly,
Noah
Or if this felt true or meaningful or useful, feel free to share!