The Race to Nowhere

I don’t know about you, but autumn always feels like the actual new year to me. I haven’t been in school or university for years, yet there’s just something about the shift to cooler temperatures, apple season, and sales on pencil cases that brings out some of the best fresh start energy out there.

(Do I need another box of pens? No. Do I buy more pens anyway? Hell to the yes.)

With this fresh start energy, there’s also an uptick in how I take care of my house. In summertime, I can tune out a lot of clutter, mainly because I’m too busy trying not to lose half of my body weight to sweating in the intense heat. Come autumn, I’m ready to clear the slate.

But with my newfound energy to turn Marie Kondo into a verb and make my house ambitiously unrecognizable, I also notice something else settle in:

In short, it’s the race to nowhere.

The race to nowhere is what I call the frustrating phenomenon when your body essentially takes over and acts out a pattern that shifts you into a state of hustle for no ...apparent reason. Best part? You can be completely unaware of it. (Until you become aware of it, which hopefully you might after reading this.)

For me, this particular race to nowhere shows up as a hurried-for-no-reason state of annoyance as I clean my house.

It’s predictable. It’s stressful. And it’s something I can’t unsee since learning about it.

My husband lovingly (...or rather, exasperatingly) dubs my housework version of the race to nowhere as “a rampage”.

I don’t just clean the house. Instead, I will tear around like an amped up Tasmanian devil, dusting shelves, doing dishes, tidying clutter, and generally organizing-all-of-life with such an intensity that you’d think the world depended on me not only completing all the tasks, but doing it all in forty seconds flat.

Why the rush? I have no freakin’ clue. That’s the race to nowhere.

I’m rushing, but there’s no real reason for it. There’s always another task. Always another thing to check off the list. But it doesn’t end with housework.

You experience the race to nowhere anytime you take some aspect of your life and turn it into a “mission”. And not just a mission that matters to you, but one that needs to be done this very second. A quasi-fugue state sets in, and before you know it, you’re revved up and stressed without any actual crisis. In doing this, we take the ordinary tasks of life and turn them all into an emergency.

If you’ve experienced this, you know it really does a number on you.

I never intend to fall into this race. I don’t mean to move into that fired up state when I start my best attempt at sparking joy or in the very least, dustlessness, in my house.

There’s no emergency, but some days my body doesn’t seem to know that.

And it’s no surprise that whenever I find myself in this rush to nowhere, I’m sighing – quite literally sucking in air to sustain myself – so I can feel that oddly satisfying mixture of busyness and doingness.

Your version of a rush to nowhere may show up in other areas of your life, breathlessly creating emergencies where there aren’t any.

You might race from task to task at work, hurriedly stress while you run errands, or whirl through a million laptop tabs without ever really seeing them.

Or maybe your version of the race is broader, so you’re jumping from one completed goal to another, like the floor is lava and the only safe spaces are when you’re locked onto the next mission for yourself. (This isn’t to say deadlines or constrained timing don’t exist, but in the race to nowhere, the stakes are notoriously self-made.)

As with everything, it’s always about the deeper pattern.

It’s never actually about cleaning the house, or the motivation you have to reach your next goal. It’s about what state you’re most comfortable in, what environments trigger the race in you, and what circumstances you’ll continue to create for yourself so you can live in that state.

Not because it’s fun — but because it’s familiar.

No matter how it shows up, the race to nowhere can make you feel like you’re not safe to create at a pace that is kind to your body and experience.

We know this can lend itself to burnout, but there’s another downside to the rush to nowhere. Namely, it can hide our lives from us. When we’re so busy to get this done and move onto that, we’re getting stuck in a mindset of future pacing our lives to the point that we don’t live them.

I don’t often experience FOMO. I’m more of a “JOMO” type of girl, who gleefully soaks up the ‘joy of missing out’ from anything that requires uncomfortable clothes or small talk. But when I think about the rush to nowhere, I’m met with a FOMO that runs deeper than missing out on flashy events or experiences:

I’m worried about the fear of missing out on my own life.

I hate to invoke Ferris Bueller, but life does move pretty fast, and if you don’t stop to take a look around, you might miss it.

But I’d go one step further and say that if you don’t stop creating a race where there isn’t one, you’ll not only miss out, but you’ll speed through through some of the richest moments of your life – the ones where simplicity, softness, and clarity can be found.

Most of the people who rush to nowhere have earned the habit, and we all have different tasks or places that trigger it. Maybe you saw your mother needing to race around between work and family. Maybe you soaked up movies or media where “grown ups” were rushing from daycare to work, stressed about their lives. Or maybe it’s just something we pick up from others in our industry that sets the expectation of how certain tasks get done. (Social media is notorious for perpetuating this race to nowhere!)

I will forever be banging on about how our brains and bodies play a huge role in our creativity, and it’s worth paying attention to this habit if you’ve noticed it. Once you see it, you’ll find it’s much easier to catch in the moment. And when that happens, you can ask yourself what you’re really running for – or from.

Nicola Hobbs has some words on this that come to mind:

“Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? Women who aren’t afraid to take up space in the world? Women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax - without guilt, without apology, without feeling like they need to earn it? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one.”

Whatever the reasons the race to nowhere can kick in for me, I’d also like to keep becoming a woman who relaxes.

Often, we think that means rest, but it can also mean simply being aware, and finding ways to do the low-stakes, human tasks of our lives with less stress… and more presence.

And that’s a joy sparker if there ever was one.

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