Finding Acceptance in an Overwhelmed Life

There’s no arguing that, in today’s day and age, most people are up to their eyeballs in the demands of life.  We live in complex times too.  Gone are the days when our professions were chosen for us by the families we were born into, like our pioneers, and gone are the days when the demands of our day started and stopped in one domain, like just working, or just parenting, or just studying.  Nope, today we’re all jacked up on the ‘shoulds dos’ and ‘have tos’ that usually come from all that we are doing, like, working full-time while parenting, going to school, and supporting our community, or whatever...right?  Now, I don’t mean to say that long ago we humans had it easy.  No, but it was a simpler time.  Let us also factor in that, just a few decades ago, people were not navigating the level of technological distractions and lifestyle messaging from the media that we experience today.  We are heavily influenced.  What’s really remarkable about it all too, is the fact that, generally speaking, we humans just accept it all and work to adapt to it as though this is the plight of humanity.  “That’s Life!”, we say. Life becomes something that just happens to us. Instead of humans-being, we are humans-doing. Sink or swim right?  So, we forge ahead with our ‘should dos’ and ‘have tos’.

The expectations on people to thrive today are high and the pressure this creates is enormous for some, especially those of us who have not been taught to thrive in ways that honor our wellness or protect our integrity. Because of this, many of us are living at a disadvantage and lack the skills and the support we need in order to truly move through life in ways that are more enjoyable and satisfying for us. Our youth today have huge shoes to fill and I get the sense that most of them are just drinking from a fire hose and getting swept away in it all with little chance to incorporate their true sense of self and talent into their major life decisions.  I think most of us can relate to this to one degree or another.  Beneath the pile on top of us lies the true essence of humanity within us.  If we’re lucky, we’ve found a way to allow our truest self to co-exist in our lives, but for many of us it’s stuffed deep down inside waiting to be acknowledged.  For some of us, when those buried parts of us dare to shine through, it often results in internal conflict.  This conflict can create a lot of discomfort and uncertainty in life, because we are not always sure how to honor the demands of life while also honoring our truest and most innate self.  At times these two things can seem like polar opposites.