On a Slow Lift
These past few days have seen a lot of effort required to start writing these blogs – I’d been feeling quite stressed with other things going on. I didn’t expect writing these to be a habit upon which I could easily rely myself to carry out daily just yet – at least not without some convincing required first. But, lo and behold, I managed. That fact excites me, showing me that, provided I can muster the same will to write every day, the amount of willpower required to do so will slowly drop. I do, of course, anticipate taking it easy on myself, planning for breaks, as I’ve written about before. But right now, the mission as I see it is to plough onward, to earn that moment in the future.
That’s just a quick progress report, but what I particularly wanted to talk about here was that stress and generally low mood I was in. The past tense may have been wrong there, as I would be lying if I told you the feelings have gone away entirely – which is my larger point. I’m no stranger to guilt and stress, and any other negative emotions that stew in me to create a quite literal gut reaction. It’s only this time, however, that I’ve taken notice of how it tends to dissipate and release me back to the powers of mundanity or, if I’m lucky, bonheur. It’s slow. Far slower, than I would have thought, and I think I’ve dialled in on why. I’m rarely stressed about one thing in particular – and if I am, I usually find a way to break that down into smaller, cumulatively equal, stressful chunks. Moreover, it isn’t as simple as each of those mini-stresses being put to rest, because nothing in life is as clean-cut, as I’ve started to find.
An issue is hypothetically resolved – hooray. Then, what? Usually, nothing, which is not the reaction I expect in myself yet is the one I always get. There seems to be a sort of delay, a mandatory waiting period of sorts, between that resolution and the dissolution of my worries. Even as I made an effort to notice the change as it happened, it’s something that only occurred to me after it had happened – and I didn’t feel as badly as I did before. On the far more common occasion that the issue is resolved completely, that delay is far more sustained and easy to notice. That last piece of unmanaged worry serves as the iron shackles around the feet of my emotional progress, holding me back on the racetrack that ends in finally concluding this needlessly inelegant metaphor.
It would be nice if pain had an on/off switch – if the logic I crave and value was reflected in the inner workings of my psyche and emotions. Sadly, not, but I think I can find one, perhaps very obvious reason as to why. Pain and discomfort are inherently negative concepts, typically extant as warnings against repeating actions, training our cavemen minds, very much the hard way. I know not to touch a hot stove. I now know not to let so many things build up so as to allow for me to be stressed by all those things this week.
It has helped that I have something interesting on the horizon – a project that may involve the help of some of my readers, but I’ll let you know about that when there’s more to say.