Leaning into Overwhelm’s Embrace
Conventional wisdom would tell me I should launch this site by telling you I’ve got the solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. That wisdom teaches the 3-step, ten most effective, insider’s secrets to getting ahead of the pack, overcoming your fears and become your best self! It’s the all-natural, no-side-effects, work with your strengths and blow the opposition out of the water, life-saving approach to success. But I won’t be doing that. I’m starting with a confession: I am overwhelmed.
I have found myself engulfed with brutal examples of management practices that demean and diminish employees. I’ve been bewildered in the face of a rigid indifference toward the gaping wounds of our weeping planet. I’ve felt myself drowning with grief as I watch the rising hostilities and violence. And, all the while, I have been dazed by an ideology that has completely deserted any pretence at humanity, outsourced its impact to therapists who can boost well-being and resilience, no matter how callous the system.
Bad Karma? Maybe. But I am suspect it is existential, rather than consequential.
I teach leadership to educators as part of my day job. I have students who ask me how best to respond. My usual answers have been: ‘do your best to embody the humanity you see missing’, ‘attend to the relationships’, ‘care’, ‘show what’s important to you by role modelling’, ‘invest in systems and processes that make people important’ and, sometimes, ‘wear the pain’. There’s lots of nodding when I dish up this advice. They swallow, gird up their loins and head back into the fray. It’s the advice I have been following too, despite the relentless cascade of what some authors are calling “bullshit management”.
I have set off each day to do more, be extra, manage-up and leverage my assets. Higher, fast, stronger! Fix the systems, alleviate the strained relationships, absorb the brutality - just keep raising awareness. And, at every turn, another graceless, blundering mimicry of leadership, reminds us how much work there is to do. Hold tight, grip harder, join hands and we will get there.
But that is an illusion. No matter how tightly we cup our hands, how many hands join together, we cannot exclude the ocean. It seeps in, washes over or simply presses our fingers until the grip fails. Resisting is arduous and ultimately, useless. And, that got me to wondering… what if I stopped resisting the overwhelm, opened my hands and let it wash over me, instead? And so, ensued the most difficult, and wonderful, 5 years of my life.
Stay with me, I’ll share what I have seen.
Moments of sweet overwhelm allow us to lean in gently. Imagine glancing into a beautifully set shop window and catching a glimpse of another world. Or, being pulled out of your preoccupations by a magnificent sunset that reminds you of our incredible ride on this planet. Perhaps a good book transports you.
Art, film, theatre, architecture, t-shirts, nature, people’s faces; any of these can offer a tiny wave of overwhelm. The point is ‘were you moved’? Sweet or bitter-sweet these tiny, everyday moments, show us worlds outside our awareness and, in some small way, move us. They are ‘world showing’.
Stepping it up a little: in amongst the other examples of overwhelm of this last five years, I’ve been utterly overcome by love at the most impossible moments. Falling, tumbling, floating and longing – totally swept up. I’ve also had incredible epiphanies that washed away much of what I was taught was gospel. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar? Overwhelm neither adheres to a meeting schedule nor shows any respect for conventional wisdoms. It doesn’t wait for an invitation; for you to finish dinner, get to the perfect point in your career or for when you have a free moment. It transgresses our neat arrangements of time and space. Upsetting, disturbing and disrupting – it moves us, what we think we know, how we experience existence and who we hold others to be.
Because overwhelm’s ‘direction’, if you will, is tangential to the current path, its movement is transgressive. Personified, its intent is to disrupt ‘business as usual’. Sound familiar? From ‘this is the new normal’ to ‘there will no longer be a normal’. Or, expressed another way, ‘disruption is the new normal’. No matter who you are or where you live, overwhelm is knocking at the front door.
It supersedes the preposterous arrogance that we have this ‘all stitched up’. Watch the news for ten minutes and that claim is clearly erroneous. My carefully constructed, well-read, reflexive sense of self has been repeatedly submerged and I have completely reconsidered my way of being. In this way, overwhelm urges growth and authenticity.
Nice right?
Sure, but frankly, all of that is trite when set alongside its most profound offering. Overwhelm, is the seed of art, culture and civilisation. It is creative genius waking us from slumber and rousing us to create. Overwhelm is the genesis of world founding.
In this last five years, several of my friends have started new schools based in some seriously alternative ways of being on this planet. When I speak to them, what strikes me most clearly is that they lent in, let themselves be moved, changed, even transformed, and the energy and insights of that experience created something which embodies a newly imagined world. These people are world founders. I asked one for some advice on what to do and she said, “It’s easy, just start a new university.”
A University of World Founding? Well, that should keep me off the streets for a while. But my question is, “What is knocking on your door?”