knots tied in between anger, boredom, and anxiety

Task (1): Meet the world each day somewhere between whatever terms it gives me and whatever terms I give it.

Task (2): Remain stress free.

Task (3): Try not to laugh/cry/scream at the combination of 1 and 2.

I have been mulling over how much of stress is a choice and how much of it just is. --As immovable, unalterable fact. It would seem that my body, and human bodies in general, were not made for stressing. They were not made for worry. They were not made for life to be so... hard. We are such fragile creatures for all of our bluffing and hoping and straining.

But how much of life being hard comes from our making it harder than it has to be?

I had a history teacher once who said that the purpose of history was to remind us that just because this is the way things are, does not mean that this is the way things should be or always have been. And ever since those words left his lips, they have followed me. He continued to explain that we need history to tell us that sometimes we need to fight and sometimes fighting is ugly. More than that, sometimes the way things are is, quite simply, wrong; and when it is wrong, we are not powerless. We are not restrained to a passive watching of the world, our world.

Those words have made me bold on more than one account in the years since. Lately, however, I have been really good at refusing to apply this idea. I am not so much the humanist that I can believe that a man's or woman's destiny is in their own hands entirely; but I do believe that the many of us spend too much time reacting to a life that appears to just happen. We are not as powerless as we often feel. We can take responsibility for more than we realize.

Those are dangerous beliefs. They are heavy and ready to add their own layer of chaos to the pile of things worth stressing about. And up until now, I have "turned a blind eye". Yet, I feel it is time to apply the process to the process itself... if that makes sense.

Because apparently, handling stress well is not merely refusing to let things bother you by forcing them into unsee-ably dark corners of yourself. And it is more than cheap denial or delayed reactions. It is not storing it for later to be dealt with when no one else is around. Apparently. Which sucks because...well, I am so good at those. Or I was.

Until my body rebelled. Treason. I had done the hard work of persuasion. Mutiny from the inside.

Now, it turns out, I am not meant to house and store things for later and 'not now'. I am learning to be more intentional about letting things go. Which is strange, because I swear that that is exactly the opposite of taking responsibility and meeting life on its terms and not just being a victim of passive reaction. Yet, it takes so much more effort to say (in a way that my body actually believes), "This is not worth the pain I will feel if I hold onto this one second more."

It is letting go of my right to feel incensed, annoyed, piteous etc. But it is not denying myself emotions, because that also I feel in this seditious wreck. Instead, it is the highest honesty of feeling everything as it comes without letting it rule me. I have never been so aware of my own thoughts or how little true self-control I have. More often than not, it seems an impossible balance to strike; but I guess it is just a more mature version of choosing to feel. To feel without shutting down or being consumed by emotion. To feel emotions in wisdom, if that is possible (and I do not yet know if I believe it to be).

So here I am. Open window blowing peaceful wind across my typing fingers as I try to figure out why I hurt today. All I can figure is that I am pushing myself too hard this week and  my body is too tired to filter out the stressors. I was not always this fragile. But I did love my strength.




Also, art. I have very much enjoyed this photographer over the last few days.