A few weeks ago I woke up on a Monday with a sense of dread. My body felt heavy and constricted, and all I wanted was to stay in bed and avoid the day entirely. There were just too many balls in the air.
When I opened my calendar and task list and surveyed the week ahead, the overwhelm became more palpable in my body, and for good reason. Ten client meetings. Two long team meetings. An operating agreement to review. A laundry list of action items for our new brand and website. School drop-off and pick-up every day. And solo parenting all week while my wife was away at a team offsite.
The feeling was an old one. It first showed up in high school, the night before double sessions for football. It followed me through college midterms and finals, through venture capital days that ran from 8:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, through COVID, when I was running a coaching practice and a small angel fund at once, and through Downshift, where the to-do list always held more than a week could. The vigilance got so familiar I stopped noticing it. It just felt like the price of a full, ambitious life.
The more I studied the overwhelm, the more clearly I saw the pattern. When the feeling arrived, I wanted to withdraw and run for the door, or dissociate and numb out through any number of strategies. When it became too much, I pulled the rip cord and quit. Day in and day out, the discomfort was more than my system wanted to hold.
This time I treated the pattern as a trailhead instead of a problem. Rather than run from it or numb it, as I had all these years, I began to play with it, welcome it, and move inside of it. Up close it was fascinating to watch: just conditioning that had been messing with me for decades.
A few days later I woke up and the feeling wasn't there, even though I knew there were still plenty of balls in the air. I scanned for the overwhelm like a sentry, waiting for the desire to run. There was nothing.
Later that morning I had a session with Ryushin, the Zen Buddhist teacher I practice with each week. I was telling him about the overwhelm, about welcoming the pattern instead of running from it, and about the morning it lost its grip, when it dawned on me right there on the call.
"There are no balls," I heard myself say. "Holy shit, there are no balls."
He didn't miss a beat: "For you. Keep juggling."
Fair enough. I tried again, more precisely this time. "Metaphorically, maybe there are a lot of balls, but literally, there are no balls. There's actually nothing to juggle. They're figments of my imagination that my mind uses to create aversion and suffering. It's such an old pattern."
My whole body softened into the chair. I felt lighter, calmer. I smiled.
"That's a real place of delight," he said. "A maturation of practice. The whole notion of what's complex and what's simple starts to shift. Living this way isn't second nature. It's before the first nature."
When we hung up, the spaciousness stayed. There was more room in my chest and more possibility in the week ahead. I even felt some gratitude for the overwhelm. It had been trying to protect me the whole time, keeping watch over balls that were never there.
Nothing on the outside has changed, and I do have a lot on my plate in this season of life. I'm still building a new venture, still raising two young girls, still dating my wife, still making time for exercise and sleep, and still watching the calendar fill up with meetings.
But the weight is different. If there are no balls, there's nothing to drop. I can relax into the moment and trust that it'll all get done one step at a time, and I can't tell you how liberating that's starting to be.