Too much

Wednesday evening, Drew, Duncan, my Mom and I were all hanging out at home when the power went out. Drew and Duncan were downstairs in the family room and my Mom and I were upstairs in the laundry/craft room. There were no exclamations from the basement, however. I felt my way down the hallway and down the stairs to discover a glowing light in the room. It was Hunter's laptop, and it was running on battery power, bathing the otherwise dark room in a comfy glow of light.

We grabbed some candles and I found the little box of matches I keep at my desk. No emergency-type candles here! They were all cute smelly things. If you're going to have a power outage, why not have it smell good, right? About five minutes later the power came back on.

My mom thought the event was the result of a storm coming in. No one else could come up with an explanation, but we were glad to have electricity in the house again. It's so handy.

This morning, the three kids and I were all sitting in the family room. Five computers were running and the lights were on. Duncan had also turned on the space heater, which I got out and used for a while last night. I was giving myself a pedicure next to the space heater. Then the lights went out again. It was like a repeat of the other night, except this time there was daylight coming in the windows and there were still lights on in the hallway.

The breaker! But what were we doing differently with the electricity than every other day? I turned off the lights and unplugged the space heater. Then I found the switchplate in the furnace room and discovered the switch labeled "family room" was halfway between "on" and "off", so I flipped it all the way off and then on again. This time I heard exclamations. The power had come back on.

Could the little space heater have been enough to pop the breaker? I was using it last night, but at that time my computer was the only one on. The heater had been running for at least an hour this morning with all the computers on, but it wasn't until that moment that the system overloaded.

Sometimes my life feels like that. I feel as though I'm running with every computer and every light on at all times, but I can feel my own breaker screaming to go off when my physical surroundings begin to get cluttered. I can handle a lot of busyness, but I can't handle the stress of visual and auditory busyness all around me. Lots of people, lots of stuff, lots of noise, and I lose it.

Sometimes I don't realize that the busyness has already popped my internal breaker until I stop and notice that the laundry isn't getting done, the house isn't getting cleaned, my inbox is stacked full of papers, and there are dirty dishes all over the table. These are the overwhelming visual clues that should have shut me down long before. Sometimes I just get too self-absorbed and miss the exclamations when my own power goes out and I somehow keep going. Battery power maybe? I suppose we all have some reserves we don't realize we're running on until they start to go out, as well.

Today I'm going to reset all the visual overwhelm around me, and get busy with the activities that are teetering on total overwhelm. I see the cues. I need to do something about it now. It's Friday, but it's also my work-schedule Monday so this is my last chance. If I don't start unplugging things now, I can tell already that breakers are going to be going off all over the place very soon.