Category: overwhelmed

  • Be still

    Rushing. I think I have lots to do. Maybe a bit overwhelmed. “I’ve been thinking,” says Emily St. John Mandel in her book Sea of Tranquility, “a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.” –Joy

  • Catastrophizing

    My neighbor took a photo of a bobcat one morning recently—at the house across the street from ours. Yikes! We overreacted—and worried about our dog Jack—and all of the smaller dogs and the cats in the neighborhood. Disaster! However, my friend Mary, a retired biologist, didn’t panic. “How exciting,” she said. “Not very many people…

  • One thing at a time

    Sometimes I am overwhelmed. Sometimes I try to do too much. As Madeleine Albright, this country’s first female of state, once said, “Women can’t do everything at the same time, we need to understand milestones in our lives comes in segments.”

  • Keep walking

    “I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it,” Kierkegaard once said. “But, by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.”

  • A simple universe?

    “We yearn for the universe to be simple, to be one thing or another,” writes Lauren LeBlanc in The Boston Globe. “But it’s not. Its contradictory nature is integral to its abundance.”

  • A snail day

    I’ve written Christmas cards, mailed packages and invited friends to my house for a birthday lunch. Today I am moving at a slower pace, and I am reminded of lines from a children’s book—Tiger Days by M.H. Clark. On snail days, I go slowly In everything I do. And, I might take a Little while,…

  • Nuance has been incinerated

    Tracy Dahlby, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues, in an article in The Dallas Morning News, that this country needs a better literary infrastructure. In his article, Dahlby quotes Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist. Nuance, Bruni says, “has been incinerated by today’s hot takes….Much of what I read…

  • Simple or complex?

    The Week magazine is celebrating 20 years of publishing with “a sampling of timeless observations” from its Wit & Wisdom column—and the quotes are marvelous. Here’s one. “If things were simple, word would have gotten around.” Those words came from philosopher Jacques Derrida—and originally appeared in TheBrowser.com.

  • I am not okay

    I am okay. That’s what I frequently tell friends when they ask how I am doing during this coronavirus pandemic. And, I am okay—almost all of the time. But, sometimes I am not okay. Recently, a friend said that she had read an interview with a mental health expert who stressed that it is okay…

  • When is eventually?

    My refrain is “stay safe.” Recently I have added, “Stay safe and sane.” Eventually, I know this virus crisis will be over. How long is eventually? I wonder if this Albert Camus quote is too dramatic: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” –Joy