Exhaustion

In this episode, we explore how, when we’re working on large-scale change, it’s all too easy to let ourselves get dangerously over-tired…

I admit it: I blundered. Again.

Or rather, I almost blundered, but caught myself just in time. Or mostly just in time, at any rate.

The blunder? Exhaustion.

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I’ve been struggling for months - more like years, by now - with a relentless sense of purposelessness, of pointlessness, of failure to do anything useful towards changing the world for the better. You know, those usual challenges that really do gnaw at the soul.

What you might call a spiritual exhaustion, I suppose. Not a good idea, anyway.

So to compensate for that, I’d been doing my usual trick of trying to do too much in the mental realm. Working on another book. And another book. And yet another book. All at the same time. While editing someone else’s book. And developing a new training-course here in Australia. Developing another course with someone else in Britain. Working with a colleague in Europe on some new ideas about economics. Working with another colleague in North America on new tools for change. Working with yet another colleague in Africa on new approaches to tackling Sustainable Development Goals. And cleaning up on a huge project to make some of my old work more accessible, more usable. All different projects, all at the same time, all in different time-zones, all around the world. Getting up at 5am, 4am, sometimes even earlier; often going to bed way after 10pm, every time frazzled after what had seemed like yet another failure of a day. And in the past few weeks, getting more and more cranky at those colleagues, for no real reason, which didn’t help either.

In short, all the usual signs of mental and emotional exhaustion. Not a good idea.

So what do I do about it? Well, you can guess: I went out into the oversized garden here, where everything has been growing like crazy because of all the recent rain, and hammered at the mowing for several hours, compounding all of that spiritual exhaustion and mental exhaustion and emotional exhaustion with physical exhaustion too. Definitely not a good idea…

What I didn’t do there was what I definitely did need to do, which was to take some proper rest, in each of those different dimensions. Which is why I very nearly had that rest thrust upon me, in ways that would not have been good at all.

Not A Good Idea…

Yeah, full-on burn-out ain’t fun, folks. I’ve been through it perhaps four times now in my life so far, maybe five: I can’t quite remember now. In each case it had put me out of action for weeks, maybe months, and in effect had been a career-killer for me in that space: I couldn’t face going back to it, so each time I’d had to start again elsewhere in a completely different discipline. Which does have some advantages for an old generalist like me, I suppose, though it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time…

But this time, fortunately, I did catch the warning-signs in time. Just about in time. I hope. No real damage done. Not so far, anyway. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to write this, would I?

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And it’s not just me, of course: this kind of overdoing-it is a risk for just about every one of us working on large-scale change. So much of it to do, all of it so impossibly urgent, and so often it’ll feel like we’re trying to do all of it all on our own. No wonder we tend to overdo it. Yet doing that is Not A Good Idea…

For all of us, there are huge, huge changes that we face, often at what can seem to be insanely-vast scales: no-one with any awareness of what’s going on in the world right now has any doubt about that. But we can’t do it all on our own: we need friends and allies to do it with, or else it won’t work. And it’s simply not possible to achieve those changes all in one go, in the kind of timescales that we would probably prefer: no matter how urgent it might be, too much change all at once brings on its kind of collapse, often leaving us worse off than where we started.

That’s why this newsletter-or-whatever is called Small Changes. Not grandiose ‘big changes’ all at once, with big fanfare and all the rest, but small changes, many, many many of them, yes, yet quiet, connected, coordinated, on-purpose. Because when we’re facing really large scale change, focusing on the here-and-now of small changes is the only way that actually works.

Perhaps the best phrase for this, for now, would be that old Latin aphorism, festina lente, ‘make haste slowly’. Make haste, yes, because we must; yet do it slowly, at its own proper pace. With proper rest along the way. That’s how we can keep things moving, moving onward, as fast as we can, without falling into that trap of exhaustion.

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