All at Once, or Not at All

 She said something maybe two minutes ago. Just an offhand comment while talking about a packed schedule:

“Why does everything happen all at once?”
And it’s weird how a simple line can flip a switch in your brain.
Because I’ve got the opposite problem. My workload, my responsibilities — I’ve scaled them back. Intentionally. Slowly. The mountain of things that used to sit on my desk, both literal and metaphorical, has gradually flattened out into almost nothing.
Now I’ve got time. Maybe too much of it.
Time to think, time to overthink, time to reflect and spiral and wonder if reducing the noise also reduced something else I didn’t mean to lose.
I used to feel like I was drowning in projects and obligations. Radios, printers, code, study, writing — everything stacked like Jenga blocks that I just kept adding to without ever pulling any out. It was chaotic. But it kept me moving.
Now? It’s like I’ve emptied the schedule, cleared the board — and found that the quiet doesn’t always feel like peace. It feels like potential, sure. But also pressure. The pressure to do something with that time. The guilt of not filling every moment. The quiet little hum in the background that says: “You’re wasting it.”
From what I can tell, she’s doing a lot more than I am. And I admire that — the way she keeps showing up, keeps moving, keeps handling what’s on her plate. Me? I’m just sort of… here. Not stuck, not unhappy, just suspended. Between chapters. 
So maybe that line — “Why does everything happen all at once?” — isn’t just about life piling up. Maybe it’s about the mental bandwidth it takes to just be here. Whether your life is full or free, the weight is real.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. Just a quiet moment where I realized that even though our days probably look pretty different, the feeling is strangely familiar.
So if you’re in the thick of everything, or in the long empty pause — I see you.
And if everything feels like it’s happening all at once? Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just us, trying to find meaning in the spaces we haven’t filled yet.