Free A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough by Wayne Muller Page B

anything or anyone in our path. Without ever wanting to, or ever dreaming our lives would end up feeling like this, we do good badly, people and things we love get hurt, requiring even more of our heart’s best care and attention. If we are honest, we might confess we are secretly worried we have no such care or attention left to give.
    Worry comes with an implicit promise that abiding in its company will ensure that our problem will be solved—that we can somehow actually worry it away, fix it before anything bad happens. But worry is a false promise, a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While neither healing nor repairing anything at all, it saturates us with stress and uses all our attention to project fear and weakness into every possible future disaster. We manufacture catastrophic expectations, which cause our biological and nervous systems to remain forever on full, exhausting alert.
    More importantly, worry steers us away from trusting in our own essential wholeness, wisdom, and strength to be able to handle, in the moment, whatever we are given. It denies any capacity to identify or recognize, when the time comes, the next right thing to do.

Getting Caught Up
    A s we feel ourselves going under, drowning in the impossible multiplication of activities, responsibilities, relationships, and requirements, we end up all but abandoning the pursuit of happiness. Our new goal isn’t so much gentle, authentic happiness, nor are we apparently seeking joy, ease, pleasure, or delight. Instead, when I ask people how they are, what they are doing or creating with their life, how they are using their precious time, their heart’s best attention, their response is invariably the same: I am just trying to get caught up .
    What could this possibly mean? This automatic response is often spoken with some tone of surrender, defeat, no sound of passion or contentment in their voice. When I hear this now familiar refrain, I cannot help but ask, gently, “Caught up to what?”
    Invariably my companion will stop, frozen in time and space, as if they have been suddenly cast into zero gravity. They are silent for a time or cock their heads slightly, confused, as if addressing a visitor from outer space, or like a dog, clueless, trying to grasp some impossible command its owner keeps repeating to no effect. “What,” they seem to think, “could he possibly be talking about?”
    Of course, no one has an answer. There is no answer. The question, however, can provoke a most interesting conversation, and it halts, if only for an instant, the habituated trance to just keep moving, get back to going full speed ahead, the ubiquitous “I’m late I’m late,” as each of us plays the white rabbit, watch in hand, scurrying off to no one ever knows quite where.
    We are so deeply absorbed in our own personal anguish, striving to gain ground in this war against time, that we often miss the “collateral damage” we unintentionally create. Our whirlwind of fearful rush and hurry saturates our days with the feeling that we are already somehow inexplicably “behind” before we make it out of the house, even before we get out of bed.
    As adults rushing headlong into getting “caught up”—especially parents who understandably want to make sure they always do their “best” for their children—we invariably feel we have never given enough, asked enough, scheduled enough, or filled enough time. We worry we might miss something, anything—when in fact our children may very well be having their own experience of a rich, full life just as they are.
    But in order to see this, we would have to stop pushing more and more into their tiny, growing lives and instead just be still and listen to what they say, what they know, what they ask. More than additional classes, lessons, adventures or toys, our own children will likely let us know that what they most want, crave, desperately need, is our presence. What they long for most is a single