Compassion Overload

Take a Break

“Today a kind of [planetary] point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts, and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations…We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world, to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print, and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (“The Beach at My Back,” Gift from the Sea, p.117-118)

          Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s little classic, Gift from the Sea, was written in 1955—long before social media, cell phones, even computers. Most households were just getting television. Yet Lindbergh was already feeling overwhelmed by the breadth of information coming at her. She wrote, “…modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations, to be stretched but body, nerve, endurance and life-span are not as elastic.” That was 65 years ago. Just think how our connections have multiplied since then and now fill twenty-four hours per day.

          I have spoken with so many people lately who express exhaustion. They describe it as a kind of fatigue that a night’s sleep does not dispel. We seem to be mystified about why this would be the case. It has become common for us to spend our days and nights watching or listening to news from a variety of sources and screens. Now, thanks to a global pandemic, we are even conducting work and school virtually. We are living through conditions that none of us have experienced before, and yet we expect ourselves to function the same way we did before the coronavirus erupted. Don’t you think that is a bit out of touch?

          Since we cannot expect the world to stop and let us take a break, we have to do it ourselves. We must turn off our technology, silence our notifications, and let our poor brains rest. We’re exhausted because we are constantly on-call, and we don’t seem to know how to not be. Heck, I get forty emails a day just from politicians trying to wring a couple of bucks out of me. I’m sure you do, too. We humans still think that technological advances save us time and energy, but we could not be more wrong. They run our lives! They are just one more thing that demands our attention.

          And, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh acknowledged, we simply have more than we can bear—fires and floods, hurricanes, epidemics, social unrest, and rising oceans. Right now, we are watching yet another wildfire in California that has already burned more than a million acres, and two hurricanes are converging in the Gulf of Mexico and headed toward poor old Louisiana—again! Schools open and close, lives are turned upside down, jobs are lost, a contentious political season is upon us—and on and on and on. This is compassion depletion due to massive overload.

We must, in spite of everything, learn to take care of ourselves. If that means taking breaks from the onslaught, so be it. A walk in nature, a day at the lake or the beach, a stroll through botanical gardens, whatever takes us away from the news and into the natural world will dispel some of our fatigue. And when you can, rest, rest, rest. We are in this for the long haul, so we must conserve our strength. Be kind to yourself. It will help you (and me) to be kind to everyone else.

                                        In the Spirit,

                                        Jane