11. JUST KEEP SWIMMING

Is anyone else feeling overwhelmed? That's a rhetorical question. There is such a buzz in the air these days that pretty much everyone I know who is actually engaged in life is feeling overwhelmed. It's been a very long time since I have had the sense that things are rolling smoothly. Trying to help keep the ones I love from drowning in overwhelm is, well, overwhelming.

This got me thinking about the word overwhelm, which of course sent me to search its origins and meanings. Turns out the word overwhelm may be redundant. Whelm itself is enough. We are basically saying we are whelm-whelmed when we say overwhelmed, but that's just semantics and making scientific something that is heart driven so I won't dive any further into the thought.

"whelm" v. :  early 14c., whelmen, probably from or altered by Old English helmian "to cover," a parallel formation to -hwielfan (West Saxon), -hwelfan (Mercian), in ahwelfan "cover over;" both from Proto-Germanic *hwalbjan, from PIE *kuolp- "to bend, turn" (see gulf (n.)).

The sense of "cover completely" is by 1550s; that of "engulf like a flood" is by 1660s. Compare overwhelm. Old English -hwielfan yielded Middle English whelven "turn upside down (as a ship); roll over and over."

My sister Ann Marie Mullen took on the mantra"Just Keep Swimming"  from the animated movie Finding Nemo when it first came out. Her family adopted it for multiple reasons, but mostly it became indicative of their ability to take what is given and swim with it. Life surely gave them plenty to weigh them down in their liquid journey.  She has a little framed picture of Dory that has followed her through two forms of cancer, a major move from their home in CA to Utah, spinal surgery, loss of the motion in one of her feet, her husband's diagnosis of Valley Fever, the difficult passage of her husband Michael through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and into immortality, a devastating diagnosis of PPA, having her children and grandchildren live thousands of miles away and many other situations that might put anyone else completely under. What she has been able to do is remind herself to just keep swimming. Move forward flapping her little fins and embracing the folks around her as they do the same. 

Just keep swimming whittles down to three words the concept of resisting over analysis.  It's healthy, especially when we get buried in trying to figure out stuff that is not figure-outable. One of the best tools of the adversary is toying with our desire to understand everything. It is certainly easier on our hearts and brains when we see meaning behind struggles. It takes real faith to just keep swimming when we don't fully understand where we are swimming and roughly how long it might take to get where we're headed.

Maybe it boils down to affirming we are in the right waters, then once we are pretty sure of that,  just keep swimming.