Do you ever feel chased by things? As in incessantly pursued, hunted down, and pressured by things in the outside world? Do you ever hit that frantic, distorted, overwhelmed, and anxious space where your heart is racing and your mind is flying and your whole body is jumping from one mad task to another and you just can’t stop because you’re so consumed by all the million things you have to do? For me it’s like a demon is chasing my tail. Except, really, the demon is me.
It’s an overwhelming sense of urgency
There’s this need, internal and insatiable, to constantly be doing something. An invisible, unstoppable, relentless force that looms larger with every task until the overwhelming sense of urgency becomes almost too much to bear. There’s no time to breathe or pause because it feels like there’s so much to do. Work stuff. Home stuff. Life stuff. The big stuff, and lots of little stuff. There’s so much stuff; an endless, endless pile of stuff, and it all has to be done now. Like right now. And no matter how much I do, I can never, ever catch up.
I feel it like a demon on my tail, gnashing its jagged fangs.
My psychologist says it’s a psychological state, an internal pressure from external things like responsibilities and expectations and internal things like our own fears and unrealistic expectations.
It’s a distinctly uncomfortable feeling. Constantly trying to keep up with wave after wave of never-ending demands. It’s like being totally on-edge all of the time. It saps all the joy out of the things that I normally love doing and it makes the joyless tasks even bleaker. And then, overlaying it all, is this fear that if I don’t keep up, everything will fall to pieces.
But it won’t stop until we stop
“These are not our natural rhythms,” says my psychologist. “Some of us may have faster natural rhythms than others, but none of us were born to feel perpetually chased. That manic, frantic, flapping, heart-palpitating frenzy is not a natural rhythm, it’s a state of alarm.”
And in order to work through that state of alarm, to ultimately release that feeling of being chased by things, she says we must first develop an awareness of it. This is the starting point. We need to consciously check in with ourselves and observe how we’re feeling, creating tiny little rituals throughout the day where we come back to ourselves, close our eyes, and ask ourselves how we’re feeling.
And then, if that “chased” feeling is there, if the demon is on my tail, she tells me to stop, to breathe, and to open my eyes and look around me.
“What is happening in front of you right now, in this exact moment? Is your desk in flames? Is there a lion launching itself at you? Is the ground beneath your feet wrenching apart? No? Okay then, you’re safe. Deal with what is in front of you – not what is in your head. Is there someone in front of you, waiting for you to join them in a meeting? Go to that meeting then, and leave everything else behind. And in that meeting, you deal with that meeting, and only that meeting.”
That’s how you move through your day, with your full presence purely on what is in front of you.
And then we find our natural rhythms in nature
She tells me to get out into nature again. “To get in sync with ourselves, to find our own natural rhythms, we take our guidance from nature.”
She doesn’t mean we need to take a great voyage up a mountain, go forest bathing, or book a safari; she means we get out into nature in whatever ways are most accessible to us. The garden will do. The beach, if there is one. A park. A tree. The sky.
Because, my psychologist reminds us, we are nature. We’ve just been conditioned to forget that, to think of ourselves as something separate, something other. But our bodies remember. And so, when we escape the buildings and get our feet back onto the raw earth, there, underneath the naked sky, amongst the butterflies and the whispering winds and the call of the birds, we are home.
In nature, we don’t need to try to find our pace, our natural rhythm, because the more we’re there, the more the illusion of separateness dismantles. Nature quells the flurry of activity in our overstimulated brains, our cortisol levels come down, our muscles relax, our hearts beat to calmer rhythms. In essence, reconnecting with nature soothes our rough edges, creating more space for us to be our whole selves.
And if you don’t have a garden, a beach, a park, or a tree, surround yourself with as many natural elements as you can. Like flowers and pot plants, sunlight and sounds. Anything that evokes nature for you. You’ll know what it is when you find it – your whole body will respond.
Because “this moment” is a delicious goo
I’ll be honest … at first, I found it hard to pause. At first, that feeling of being chased by things got louder. Because doing nothing is exactly what we feel we shouldn’t be doing. But I stayed with it, I breathed into it, I immersed myself in nature, totally. Something I hadn’t done in far too long.
I allowed my heart to be caught by some natural wonder, something that pulled me into this moment. “This moment” that is always so grounding, “this moment” where somehow everything is a little slower, “this moment” where the frenzy melts into a delicious goo.
And those natural wonders that pull at my heart are always simple things. Yet things that are different every time. Sometimes it’s a gentle breeze that feels like a song, moving the trees to play like violins amongst its quiet breath. Or it’s the curious glow of optimism imbued in the scent of a lemon. Sometimes it’s a little nap on a sun-drenched bed. Or stolen kisses. Or falling into the sound of the ocean. Maybe it’s just watching the birds, or the clouds, or goofing around with my fur babies.
It’s different things on different days that pull me back into my natural rhythm. And I never know what it will be until my body responds to it. All I need to know is to ask, “What do I need right now?”
I found a beautiful symmetry
One day, in the midst of a demon-on-my-tail frenzy, when I was half-wondering what I could do to slow myself down to a slightly more human pace, a knowingness emerged in me. And this knowingness whispered, quietly, “It matters not so much what we do, but how we do it.”
I loved this message. I took it in. I held it. And almost instantly, the whirlwind of all those urgent tasks and heavy responsibilities froze in mid-air, like particles in a storm. Each one like a grain of sand. And then I watched, as one by one, they rearranged themselves into some kind of beautiful symmetry. Softly, they floated back to earth, each piece finding its own perfect place. So exquisitely. Some pieces disappeared entirely. Because they didn’t matter anymore. And there was a beautiful symmetry to that too.
There was, within me, an okay-ness with both “what is” and with “what isn’t”. It was like the ground had rearranged itself beneath me completely – supporting me and holding me in a way I’ve never really felt before.
And so, whenever I feel the demon chasing my tail (it still happens now and then), I step outside, immerse myself in nature, reconnect with my own natural rhythm, and recall the symmetry of the things that matter and the things that don’t. And then I remind myself, once again, that it’s not what we do that counts, it’s not what we accomplish or tick off our lists. It’s the experience. The joy of it.
You know when we lose ourselves in an activity like children at playtime? That.
