Showing posts with label Stress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stress. Show all posts

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Ridin' the Storm Out

"Ridin' the storm out, waitin' for the thaw out..." 
- REO Speedwagon - 




It's a beautiful, bright and sunny day in the Texas Panhandle. Not a cloud in the sky dampens the horizon. Yet, here I sit procrastinating. The storm of change is coming and I should be preparing for its onslaught, but I'm not. I'm in a state of fear and denial. I'm like the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand. However, like the bird, my butt is sticking up in the air and I'm sure I'm about to take one for the team with no lube, if you know what I mean.  

My spousal unit tells me I don't have to carry the burden alone for what's going on at home. I'm cynical and jaded right now. I feel like I do.  I have to-do list after to-do list made up.  They grow longer by the day and there's not enough hours to tackle even a portion of them. So I suppose that's why it's easier to sit and do nothing than to get off my ass and do "something." But as the deadline for having all this stuff done grows near, the self-loathing for not having anything done sooner will grow to biblical proportions and I'll be kicking myself in the hind-end that already took one. Double-whammy.

How does one prep for change when one doesn't want things to change in many regards, but does in others? How does one know if they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing? How does one make decisions that alters their life, but also the lives of so many people around them for good, bad or indifferent and those people don't have much say? It frustrates me on a level that's almost unbearable. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing and there's at least one person I need help from that's is unwilling to do so. It's frustrating beyond the tolerable and I try to shove that fed-up part of me in the back of my mind, but it niggles at me from time to time and I just want to break like a squall line dumping rain across the plains.  (Long run-on sentence. Sorry.)

I wish I could say more as to what's going on, but I'm not at liberty right now. Just know that my life is upside down and I don't like the view. I've lost my rose-colored glasses. If I can just ride this storm of change out and wait for the thaw out, things will be okay. But right now, I'm feeling the outflow boundary, the winds kicking up and the rush of air blowing across my face. I see the lightning on the horizon and hear the distant rumbles of thunder. The storm is coming and as it hits I will just pray for the best. 

Okay... going to suck it up and get to work. Tally-Ho!


Monday, July 15, 2013

Waiting to Exhale

I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace. 
~Terri Guillemets



In the past few weeks, I have been under a stress load that mechanical engineers would have a hard time finding a logical answer to the equation of "how is it  possible to hold that kind of load." 

Life changing news has come about which I'm not at liberty to share at this time, I'm 100 pages into my first full-length novel and self-doubt and worry is running amok, my mother's health is troublesome, my daughters are starting to take test runs from the nest and other things are going on between home and work that have me wondering if I'm made of elastic and what the ultimate breaking point is.  I think my stress load can be equated to the load per unit area or the force (F) applied per cross-sectional area (A) perpendicular to the force as shown in the equation below:
 
Now, the best part of this whole thing is I just probably sounded really smart here and I have to thank Engineersedge.com for their insight for the formula above. I could honestly try to figure it all out, but the left side of my brain, the analytic side, has a very hard time with math and physics. I'm a right-brained person overall and if I think about it at length, it gets complicated and I'd probably short circuit. I try not to think about it.  Darned analytics. Now I'm thinking about it. 

So back to yoga. 

It's something not-so-new I'm working on. I'm seriously trying to decompress and work on some kind of Zen state I really want to achieve. I seriously doubt I will achieve that calm that surpasses my understanding; however, if I can reach a point where I can focus on the breath and the body and shut the world out for however long, I will have achieved something. Eh?

Now... back to downward dog... Which to tell you my mental state always makes me think, "Bad dog, good dog," while I'm waiting to exhale... I gotta work on that.