When Life Is Too Much: What Is Still Yours to Choose

Squish.

That’s not a sound—or a feeling—you want from your basement floor.

I had gone downstairs to feed the cats and clean their litter boxes before leaving for the vet. I stepped onto the LVP and water pushed up through the seams around my foot. Oh, oh. I stepped again.

Squish.

Well, shit.

We’ve had water issues before, so I started checking the obvious places. I went to the furnace and hot-water-heater room first. Nothing. I checked the sump-pump room. Nothing there either. Then I looked at the ceiling for a wet spot or a dripping pipe—anything that might explain why there was suddenly water underneath a floor that was definitely not supposed to have water underneath it.

I had no idea where it was coming from, and I didn’t have time to find out. The dogs had a vet appointment thirty minutes away, I still had to corral them into the car, and somewhere on the other side of all of this was a workday that had apparently failed to receive notice that my morning had gone completely off the rails.

So I did what any calm, grounded person with years of mindfulness training would do. I left the mysterious water in the basement and started chasing Yorkies.

Apparently, we weren’t finished

In my haste, I forgot the paper towels. This was particularly brilliant because I already know Maddie has a tendency to get carsick.

For approximately twenty-five minutes, she held it together. Five minutes from the vet, in traffic, she started throwing up.

Of course she did.

I couldn’t pull over. I couldn’t reach her. And even if I could have reached her, I had nothing to clean it up with because the paper towels I’d specifically meant to bring were sitting safely at home, presumably somewhere above the unexplained body of water beneath my basement floor. At this point, I was also officially late for work.

There are moments when life becomes so absurdly committed to the bit that all you can really think is, You have got to be fucking kidding me.

We eventually made it to the vet, which is attached to a pet store.

Opal pooped in the store.

Because apparently the morning wasn’t finished with me yet.

When everything feels urgent

I wish I could tell you that somewhere between the wet basement and the dog poop, my mindfulness training kicked in. It did not. There was no beautiful moment in traffic when I took a conscious breath, centered myself and lovingly accepted the morning exactly as it was. I was stressed, and my brain was trying to hold all of it at once.

Where the hell was the water coming from? What if there was a leak somewhere I couldn’t see? I was late. Maddie was sick. I needed to clean the car. Work was waiting for me.

This is one of the particularly unfair things about stress: just when life requires more of our mental bandwidth, stress itself can make some of the thinking we’re relying on harder. Research on acute stress has found effects on executive functions including working memory—the ability to temporarily hold and work with information—and cognitive flexibility, which helps us adjust our thinking as circumstances change. The effects aren’t identical for every person or every kind of task, but the larger point is reassuringly ordinary: a stressed brain isn’t necessarily operating under ideal conditions.

Meanwhile, trying to mentally bounce among several problems isn’t free either. What we casually call multitasking often requires us to switch attention repeatedly, and research has consistently found costs associated with those switches in speed, accuracy or cognitive effort. My brain’s attempt to simultaneously solve the basement, the vet, Maddie’s stomach, the car and work was therefore not necessarily the impressive display of responsibility it felt like at the time.

Mostly, it was exhausting.

What actually needs me right now?

There’s a question I wish I had consciously asked myself that morning:

What actually needs me right now?

That’s different from asking what needs to be handled. Plenty needed to be handled. It’s also slightly different from asking what I was responsible for, because I was responsible for all kinds of things. Even What can I control?—a question I’ve used many times and still find valuable—was broader than what I needed in that particular moment.

I needed a smaller question.

While I was sitting in traffic, the basement did not need me. There was absolutely nothing I could do about the water from the driver’s seat. Work would have to wait until I arrived. The vomit would remain exactly where it was until I had both the supplies and the opportunity to clean it. Opal’s contribution to the morning, once we reached the store, required somewhat more immediate attention.

Underneath all of it was the least interesting but most important job I had in that moment: drive the damn car.

Sometimes that’s what choosing looks like when life is too much. It isn’t choosing a better attitude or pretending five legitimate problems have suddenly become unimportant. It isn’t even necessarily choosing calm. Sometimes we aren’t calm, and frankly, given the circumstances, that makes perfect sense.

It’s deciding which thing gets us now.

Some things are going to have to wait

I think that’s harder than it sounds, particularly for those of us who are accustomed to being responsible. When something needs attention, we want to give it attention. When several things need attention, we somehow expect ourselves to expand accordingly.

Five problems? Fine. Apparently I’ll become five people.

Except I can’t.

So instead, I have a tendency to carry one problem in my hands and four more in my head. I can be answering an email while thinking about an appointment, dealing with one problem while mentally rehearsing another, or sitting in traffic while my brain conducts an entirely useless investigation into a basement thirty minutes away.

Sometimes that kind of mental juggling is unavoidable. There are also times when several things genuinely require quick action. But letting something wait isn’t necessarily neglect when you’re accustomed to being the person who handles things. That morning there were several legitimate demands on my attention and only one of me. No amount of competence, mindfulness training or increasingly frantic mental juggling was going to change that arithmetic.

Something was going to have to wait.

The world kept going

Eventually I got home. The vomit was still there, and I cleaned it when I had the appropriate supplies. The basement was still wet, and as I write this, the case of the mysterious basement water remains unsolved.

I was also late for work.

I would love to tell you that this is where something profound happened. It didn’t.

I logged on late, dealt with what needed dealing with and discovered something that shouldn’t have been surprising at all.

The world went on.

That may have been the most useful part of the entire morning. When I’m overwhelmed, my mind has a remarkable ability to make every unfinished thing feel as though it requires immediate resolution. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t.

Nothing about that morning became less inconvenient because I couldn’t deal with everything at once. The basement still needed investigating. The car still needed cleaning. Work still needed me.

I simply couldn’t deal with all of it at once.

There’s a difference.

I’m still someone who will try. I know this about myself. Knowing better and consistently doing better are, annoyingly, not the same thing. But I’m trying to remember the smaller question when my mind starts treating every demand as though it needs all of me immediately:

What actually needs me right now?

Sometimes the answer will matter enormously. It might be someone you love, your own body asking you to stop, or the thing you’ve been avoiding that really does need your attention.

And sometimes the answer is considerably less profound.

Drive the damn car.

The other things may have to wait.

They can.

I have proof.

The world still goes on.