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.
No matter how fast we go,no matter how many comforts we forgo . . .there never seems to be enough time.
JAY WALLJASPER
2
Why Cramming and Cutting Don't Work
In the past, we used two ways of coping with the challenge of too much: We crammed things in or we cut things out. These are natural, normal, and effective responses to life at a certain pace.
Cramming is trying to fit more and more into the same, limited time and space using the same, limited energy and stamina. Until the pile of rocks changed into the Mountain of Too Much, cramming worked just fine: We became more efficient and more productive. We learned to manage our time better, to move faster, and to sprint through our day without pausing for breath. But that was before we reached the critical mass of too much. Now it causes us to be overwhelmed and stuffed to overfull; thus, we are left frustrated and feeling like we have no room left for ourselves. Whenever I feel this stuffed feeling, I often show it through moodiness, irritability, and spiritual malaise.
Think of packing your suitcase. Have you ever tried to cram things in? You cram and cram and even resort to sitting on it to force it closed, but there is a moment when, with just one more pair of socks, the suitcase will not close. And even if we manage to jam the suitcase shut, we may rip its seams or risk it popping open in midflight. Think of yourself as that suitcase: Your seams are ripping and your emotional insides are bursting out and spilling into the middle of your day. That's the point we're at. Cramming no longer works. There is simply too much to fit in.
Cutting out is excluding things from our lives to make more room for new demands. We become good at prioritizing: We drop old friends to make room for taking our kids to soccer, we eliminate lunch to get a little more work done, we cut short our days off to catch up on a report, and we wake up an hour early to have time for exercise. But this works only to a certain point. Finally, you can cut out no more. You get down to the essentials: work, personal responsibilities, and a necessary amount of sleep and social time. When demands from work or family crises intervene, leisure time, exercise, social life, and days off go out the window. Finally, there comes a time when there is nothing to cut and still too much to do. Our health—mental and physical—suffers. We voice the complaint that I hear most often in my seminars on stress: We feel as though we are moving through life, but not actually experiencing it. As you probably know from your own life, cutting just no longer works.
The Mountain of Too Much is new and therefore calls for new skills. It's long past the time to let go of these once-effective responses. They are ineffective habits of behavior. They are also a form of denial, that which is a lack of awareness of a situation too painful or disturbing to acknowledge in this case the problem of too much. Besides being futile, these habits are robbing us of the pleasure of life.
But there is something new that you can learn to do. I call it Stopping.
I have a very full and busy lifeand occasionally I am asked,“Scotty, how can you do all that you do?”The most telling reply I can give is,“Because I spend at least two hours a daydoing nothing.”
M. SCOTT PECK
3
Doing
