Transitory periods in life are always difficult.

Aren’t they?

We’re swiftly stretched and thrust into a violent stormy sea. We’re called to swim between the chaos of mounting waves. Your view is obstructed. Your sense of purpose dilutes to the mere necessity: survival.

Do whatever it takes to keep going.

You now find yourself completely bogged down, tangled up in the knotted harnesses of work, family, friends, errands, projects, and responsibilities—trying to balance the myriad of activities while attempting to keep this ship afloat amidst all the uncertainty ahead.

You’re now thrown way off balance, left with no time for yourself. So much so that the very moment the waves scatter and the sun peaks its rays through the thickness of dark clouds, and you finally sit down to take a second to just breathe, it suddenly hits you with the weight of a limestone rock:

“I’m so exhausted.”

Quite honestly, this is how I’ve felt over the past few weeks. And for the first time since launching this blog in January 2020, I’ve gone almost six weeks without publishing an article or sending out a newsletter.

This has been a year of transitions for me, and rightly so, a year of transitions for many others. For me, it was a transition in relationships, a transition in professional career trajectory, a transition in geographical location, a transition in creative projects—and it all hit a home run towards the end of August.

But transitory periods are also the norm of life. Isn’t everything always in a state of flux? And isn’t that the core teaching of the Wabi-Sabi philosophy?

The reality is this: The pendulum of life is always swinging.

Sometimes the oscillation is kind, it feels like a gentle sway with the wind. Other times, it feels like all the forces in the world have conspired against you to swing your pendulum to the far right or the far left.

The most important question here though, is this: What do you do next?

Do you cling onto that extreme, and exert all your energy trying to maintain that rush? Or do you pause, and swing the pendulum back to the centre, to the place of inner peace, where you are in control of your own energic flow in life?

When The Pendulum Pulls You to The Extremes, Slow Down and Swing it Back to Centre

If you pull a pendulum ninety degrees to one side, it will swing back to the other side with the same force. That’s just Newton’s third law of motion: For each and every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And it keeps on swinging until it loses momentum and rests back at the centre.

The problem, however, is that throughout overwhelming transitory periods in life, when all the grounds underneath you have been pulled and you’re now crawling along moving waters, it feels a lot easier to cling onto the extreme way of things.

It’s easier to keep rushing along with all the forces at play than to pause and give yourself a break. It’s easier to plunge into the stream of chaos and be dragged in a hundred directions than to shift down a gear and slowly swim out of it. It’s easier to be pulled into extremes than it is to push your way into equilibrium.

And yet we wonder why do we reach burnout? How could it be that we end up feeling so exhausted, empty, and unable to cope with the demands of life?

How did I reach the point of total and utter exhaustion?

The answer is little by little, day by day.

We break down little by little, day by day, just as how we build ourselves up little by little, day by day. The thing is, it’s easy to neglect ourselves at the expense of all that’s happening around us and fall into craters of woe and worry. It’s easy to say I’ll meditate later, I’ll journal later, I’ll exercise later, I’ll deal with it later.

The problem is, however, at what point does later become now? At what point into the future will you rise to your senses and say enough is enough?

It’s no secret that the pandemic’s injection of uncertainty and abrupt lifestyle changes have played a pivotal role in you and me feeling much more overwhelmed than usual.

In July 2020, FlexJobs partnered with Mental Health America (MHA) “to conduct a survey of more than 1,500 respondents to check in on how people are faring mentally at work during these unprecedented times,” and here’s what they found: 75% of workers have experienced burnout, with 40% saying they’ve experienced burnout specifically during the pandemic.

But more than that I think it’s the underlying pressure we feel as ambitious creatives—the pressure to keep performing at a high standard and producing at a high rate. The pressure to keep doing in spite of the fact that we’re human beings and not human doings.

Perhaps it’s driven by our need for validation. Perhaps it’s driven by a productivity-obsessed culture. Perhaps it’s driven by the pace at which the news, technology, and modern-day life advance and the irrationality of having to match it. But the blunt truth is this: The only pressure you feel is the pressure you exert onto yourself. That’s it.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu wrote these words:

“Peace is meant to be our natural state.
A whirlwind never outlasts the morning,
nor a violent rain the day.
Just as earth and sky return to peace,
so should we."

When the pendulum of life swings, dance with it; don’t resist it. But when it veers off to the extremes—when it pulls you way out of balance—you owe it to yourself to raise the white flag and retreat back to the centre.

You owe it to yourself to slow down and return to peace. You owe it to yourself to smash the shell and release all the pressure. You owe it to yourself to stay centred and balanced—emotionally, mentally, and physically.

Why? Because it’s much healthier for you to face the storm bearing balance than to be burdened by the trap of playing along with the game of extremes.

In other words, that’s the only way you can avoid crashing into burnout.

As Pema Chödrön reminds us in her book, When Things Fall Apart:

“A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, over smoke, over seduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm [to ourselves].”

When You Feel Overwhelmed, Give Yourself a Break and Do Something That Feeds Your Soul

So how do you stop the pendulum from swinging to the outer edges?

“Amazingly enough, you do this by leaving it alone,” writes Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul. “It won’t keep swinging to the extremes unless you feed the extremes with energy. Just let the extremes go,” he continues.

The salient idea here is simple: When things get a little crazy, don’t fall to that level of chaos, rise to a level of serenity instead.

Take a few days off. Live a little. Do something that enriches your soul—work-free, duty-free, errand-free. Give yourself a break and do something that feeds your soul and you will feel alive again.

Wander out of the chaos of daily life and you will naturally swing back to the centre. You will naturally flow back to it because you’ve now engulfed your soul with more richness—solitude, laughter, friendship, sunshine, play—and that leaves your mind and body brimming with vitalizing energy, bursting from your inner springs of peace.

And that’s all this is really, a gentle reminder: When life gets too chaotic and you begin to feel so overwhelmed, make it your utmost priority to put yourself first. How? By slowing down, finding your balance, and swinging the pendulum back to the centre.

Here are some ideas:

• Spend some time alone in nature.

• Explore the art of doing absolutely nothing.

• Gather a good group of friends and do something fun.

• Drop everything and play with your creativity for a full day.

• Disconnect from everything for 72 hours and go on an adventure.

• Focus only on what’s necessary right now and place everything else on hold (I decided to take a break from writing and publishing, only to resume when I felt ready again).

All these things will give you back control of your energy.

All these things will make you feel alive again.

All these things will draw your attention to the divine realization that it’s only when we’re balanced and centred that we allow ourselves the space to bathe in peace and fulfilment. And that is our space to claim our own.

And all these things will remind you of what you regularly need to be reminded of, that life is quite simple, it’s just us who insist on complicating it.