Frenzy
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
--Søren Kierkegaard
I found myself in a familiar pattern recently. I had returned from a week away (largely off the grid where I was not tending to email nor working) and was almost immediately faced with a full calendar of work commitments and social engagements.
In the years of working for myself, I’ve come to expand my appreciation for this situation – having work commitments is a great indicator of the health of my business, and having social engagements is a sign of my growing community. All good things, right?
And yet the feeling I often get in these times reminds me of when I first learned to surf and I would tumble off the board into the churning water and immediately lost my sense of up vs. down and left vs. right – everything around me would swirl for an interminable moment.
When this happens, you fumble around trying frantically to orient yourself quickly – to find the surface, to catch your breath, to make sure you know where the shore (and also the waves) are.
It’s not so different even all these years later. My first reactions are often to try to quickly climb the steep mountain of to-dos to get everything under control and calm. What it ends up looking more like is a whirling dervish blowing through an office with thousands of papers swirling in its wake.
I’ve since learned that the thing I really need to do is the exact opposite. To slow down, sometimes all the way to a stop, to gather my senses, find my direction, and re-orient before I start moving again. In this case, that meant stopping in my tracks, taking a few minutes of slow, deep breaths, and sitting down to write what ended up being part journal entry, part to-do list. All while the pounding of my heart beat out a rhythm that shouted, “Stop dawdling! Write your blog! Return those emails! Respond to those LinkedIn messages!”
The other thing I’ve learned is that I can’t wait for my thundering heart to slow down before I do. Because it might never. But I need to.
The way out of frenzy can only be resetting while you’re in it.
(But if you know how to avoid frenzy all together, bottle that up and send me one please!)
