![]() ![]() Schulte, a longtime reporter for The Washington Post and the mother of two school-age kids, has a word for this shared unpleasantness: the Overwhelm. ![]() She could be describing my days and probably yours, especially if you’re a working parent in the overcommitted middle part of life. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.” “I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. But “this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting,” Brigid Schulte writes early in “Overwhelmed,” her unexpectedly liberating investigation into the plague of busyness that afflicts us. This brain-eating assault of to-dos leaves its victims wrung out, joyless, too tired to stop and smell the roses (which probably need pruning and mulching anyway - add that to the list). Dispatch one task and six more take its place, a regenerating zombie army of obligations. Weekends, which ought to be oases of leisure, have their own hectic rhythms: errands, chores, sports events, grocery shopping, exercise. ![]() ![]() Wake up, pack lunches, get the kids to school, get ourselves to our jobs, work all day, collect the kids, make dinner, supervise homework, do the laundry, walk the dog, pay the bills, answer e-mail, crawl into bed for a few fitful hours of sleep, wake up already exhausted, then do it all over again. When did we get so busy? For many of us, life unspools as a never-ending to-do list. ![]()
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