Resources

There are times when we answer a call - and discover that we have pushed ourselves beyond our resources.  It's easy in such situations to just keep pushing until we simply fall over in exhaustion.  How many of us have experienced this in response to perceived crises?  The college student getting miserably sick following finals is a perfect example.  How effective are we when we end up in a drained state?  

Instead, it helps to stop, look, and listen to the environment around us.  Is there actually a crisis that does require us to keep moving, push through and hope to reach a safe place to stop before we fall down?  Sometimes the answer is yes.  In the case of a a medical emergency this is certainly true, but even there we need to assess carefully whether or not we can safely and effectively respond.

All too often, however, the crisis is only a perceived crisis, and could actually afford to have us wait in responding.  When our personal resources are already low, continuing to say yes to requests for assistance that are not life-threatening drains us, increasing stress levels and lowering our immune systems until we are probably going to get sick in some way.  It's nice to call a rest stop while you can actually enjoy one; waiting until you are in enforced rest by an illness-induced full stop is much less fun and harder to recover from.

Our society encourages the lack of self awareness that leads us into these draining situations.  Those of us who have answered a call to any kind of service are keenly aware of the need crying out in our World, and wish to answer to with everything we have to ease the pain, maybe even to foster some Joy.  The further down the rabbit hole of our own resources we are, the less effective we will be in answering that call. It's so easy to feel overwhelmed by the sea of pain out there, and holding perspective and building safe space gets harder and harder the more overwhelmed we feel.

We joke in our Circle about "put on your own oxygen mask before assisting another," but it's not really a joke at all. It is an admonition to stop, look, and listen to ourselves before stepping forward, to be able to honestly assess what resources we have to offer rather than always be reactively overextended.