When I was a kid I recognized that older people tended to worry about stuff. That worry manifested as attitude, anger, stress lines, heart attacks, binge drinking, and things the web is far too tame for me to recount here. New York is the capital of ‘work hard, play hard’ and likely birthed the phrase ‘burning the candle at both ends’. I decided back then that I would avoid a stress filled life and do as much as I could without overloading myself. This was a deeply naive notion. Now vacations are merely opportunities to catch up on the things that should’ve been done long ago and being off balance is merely a way of life.
This isn’t about being whelmed or overwhelmed. It is about the choices we make in life and how those choices affect us from day to day. Say for example you decide to coach a team. There are a lot of things that go into being a coach that extend far beyond handling players on the field and running practices. Each of those minute responsibilities are like tiny tick marks rubbing up against your conscience. Every morning I wake up and tell myself to make a list. Every day the list extends further and further.
We make up platitudes like, “the universe gives us as much as we can handle’ but I don’t find that to be accurate. The universe throws as much at us as it can manage. Whether or not we have the capacity to handle it is moot. I hope I can continue to handle what I do and survive what I don’t.