It’s essentially an old school bead-based calculator. You move a bead to one of two sides to keep the tally. The implication of this tool is that the total number of beads stays the same…they just get moved around within the frame.
Could the abacus be some sort of analogy for our own personal energy metrics—that what we give is taken from us?
As someone who used to ignore messages and signs that I was overextending, who used to “do it all,” and who suffered from no small amount of productivity addiction, take it from me: your decisions count, they cost, and they keep you stuck.
We are in a weird and wild time. A friend showed me a picture of a t-shirt with a picture of a cup of coffee and a glass of wine with the caption,“how I tell time.” Is this how it’s meant to be? Just get by until you die? I reject that. I bet you do, too. But we are all, at least most of us in westernized countries, struggling with the syndrome of our time…it’s called overwhelm.
Psychiatric drug manufacturers love this syndrome because it sends you right into their hands. Stimulants to increase your focus and task-orientation, antidepressants to take the edge off of all that feels intolerable, and benzos to silence your blaring internal alarm system. Is it possible, however, that overwhelm is a wise response to a real problem? The problem, which comes with the illusion of control and mastery as a source of happiness in life, is one of hyperstimulation coupled with indiscriminate choices of where to put our attention.
We’ve been sold a pile of lies predicated on our fear response. Media has us by the throats, hanging over a barrel of horrors. We are kept jumping at every beep, bing, and bong our technology makes because we are enculturated to feel like we might otherwise miss out. We stay in toxic relationships because it seems easier than leaving. We go to jobs that suck because we can’t envision the escape hatch. We are prisoners in a cell with a wide-open door, although we don’t know that we can just. Walk. Out. But how?...<<<Read More>>>....
