The word “too” gradually enters every area of our existence: every day it adds new business, contacts, purchases, obligations to us … Many of us are so overloaded that we are no longer able to appreciate the taste of life, to get joy from it. How to get out of this vicious circle?
This feeling comes gradually, starting with pain in the back, with heaviness, as if pressing on the shoulders and not allowing to breathe. Everything starts to annoy: shopping that you need to remember after work, phone calls that interrupt your child from checking homework, parties that start too late — everyone’s schedule is just crazy … Everything gradually loses its taste — even trips out of town or trips to the fitness club becomes like an obligation, and everyday life turns into a continuous run towards some obscure goal. All this is too much! Superfluous things, meetings and deeds fill our existence, displacing the most essential from it. Freedom, as Velimir Khlebnikov wrote, comes naked. How can we free ourselves?
Attention, overload
In European medicine, the term “overload pathology” has already appeared, meaning health disorders caused by excessive activity. “The state of chronic employment also affects the human body,” explains psychotherapist Gleb Lozinsky. “Such people are easy to recognize: hunched shoulders, shallow, shallow breathing – they are physically lacking oxygen. When an overloaded person has free time, his body does not relax, but toils. It is difficult to communicate with him: he always has too much information and words, his gaze is not fixed on the interlocutor, but somewhere far away, where unfinished business remains, and even simple things in his company are perceived as complex.
As we infinitely speed up the pace of life, we find ourselves in a vicious circle: we drink more coffee to work more, we eat more sweets to reward ourselves for all our efforts and efforts, we buy more to compensate for our inability to enjoy them with more things. But the more a person buys, the more care is required for what he already owns, and the less time remains that can be spent just like that, without doing something necessary. Even those things and devices that, it would seem, should free us from something, save our time, turn against us: talking on the mobile at full speed, we no longer see where and with whom we are going, processing tons of information as necessary We no longer find time to think about something of our own. After all, if being is overloaded, consciousness is also overloaded.
All and more
We want everything to be a lot, and this desire of ours is quite understandable. “Since the time of shortages, many of our compatriots have retained an internal readiness to buy, forcing them to buy what, by and large, is not needed,” says Gleb Lozinsky. — Things replace things, and the main thing is no longer possession, but the act of buying itself. With incredible speed, the new is replaced by the new, and as a result, we do not have time to enjoy what we already have. But we continue to buy new things and keep the old ones, not daring to throw anything away (“who knows, it might come in handy”), not trusting our right to live freely.
“THE MATTER IS NOT JUST ABOUT GETTING RID OF SOME OF THINGS. WE JUST NEED TO GIVE THEM MEANING BACK»
We strive to fill every minute of our lives with business, hoping that from such minutes we will have a full life as a result. “This is nothing more than an illusion,” says psychologist Alexei Lunkov. — In a hurry, having redone a bunch of things, a person understands that he did not feel any of them, did not savor every step he took. He managed everything, but there is nothing to remember, except for the fuss.”
We are also lengthening the list of our acquaintances, as if trying to convince ourselves that we ourselves are in demand and loved. Is it possible? In the abundance of contacts, we lose the opportunity to get to know at least one of the people around us closer — there is simply no time for this.
What a pity that there are only 24 hours in a day! Today, this phrase has become familiar to many. “People want to have more time because they want to do a lot and achieve a lot,” says Gleb Lozinsky. — But if there were 48 hours in a day, then we would live — by years — half as much. And if we imagine that a day contains all the hours of our life, it turns out that we need to live this very, one and only day. So long and so short.»
Exemption
Making your life easier means freeing it from everything superfluous. In the modern world, this desire is gradually becoming a trend: “days without shopping” (without transport, without tobacco), quiet parties — dating evenings that pass without a single word, “marathons of silence” as part of psychological training …
- In Search of Lost Time
«Take everything and leave!» — it is unrealistic, just as it is unrealistic to start a new life without somehow changing oneself internally. It is much more likely that we will be able to unload our existence, make it easier gradually, a little bit — for a start, realizing where exactly this feeling of “too” comes from, what most of all prevents us from living.
What are things, things, relationships? Or maybe instructive phrases, erroneous attitudes, learned by us from childhood? “We live in accordance with them, loading ourselves more and more,” says Alexey Lunkov. “Often, in order to become free, we need to free ourselves from the magic of parental advice.” This is also necessary in order to get rid of such a “legacy” of their own children, not to “load” them from an early age, but to help them learn to feel their time and live fully in it.