Let’s Leave the Stream to Talk About What’s On Everyone’s Mind – STRESS

This morning we are leaving the stream talk to hit on a subject that I used to struggle mightily with. It’s a one word subject. Stress. It’s what is fueling a lot right now, and as we all know, it is kind of unhealthy.

My old friend stress was always there beside me ready to jump right in at the drop of a hat. But I never really gave him much thought until I was on the road to a gig and listening to an audio book by Pema Chödrön. She was talking about the little stresses in life and how we work hard on trying to eliminate stress when a major event happens, but we tend to let the little things have their way with us.

After I went down last year I started put put down some thoughts for a second book and one of the chapters in the book was going to be titled The Cycle of Stress. The chapter is still sitting there with all of the others enjoying their life hanging out in the cloud, hoping one day I will get back to them.

In what I was able to write before I moved on to the next thing like a baby following jingling keys, I tried to take a look at the little stresses that defined my life. Let that sink in a little. Those little stresses are what we tend to let define our lives, and most of the time we might not even realize it. So what are we to do? How can we even begin to handle the big ones, oh, I don’t know, like basically the whole world right now, if we are controlled by the little ones? Spoiler alert… we can’t. We can pretend, but we can’t.

Start small. I made a list of little things that would stress me out, and will share it here. Maybe some of these same things Grind Your Gears (Family Guy reference. I am a Rhode Islander!):

• Being stuck at a red light.
• When a red light turns green and the guy ahead of me takes a hundredth of a second to start up.
• People talking loud on their cell phone.
• Slow service.
• The internet freezing while I am trying to run a hundred things on the wifi.
• Driving behind that person who is doing the speed limit or maybe 1 mph under the speed limit. Grrrrr.
• Watching any kind of 24 hour cable news.

The list could probably go on and on and on and on… But let’s stop there.

If some slow person at a traffic light is going to set me off, how the heck and I am going to be able to deal with the giant ball of stress that has become our world today? I could go to town on how dumb getting stressed out by anything on the list I mentioned above is, but that would take a while, and you would get bored and move on to videos of kittens playing with hamsters of something like that. Yeah, I took the time to find that video, and I hope you took the time to enjoy it.

Let’s talk about the stresses I listed above that deal with being in a car. If you are stopped by a red light, why is it a big deal? Oh wait, you are in a hurry and you might be late? Well, maybe you shouldn’t have finished that episode of whatever you were watching, and left a few minutes earlier. But here you are, stopped in your tracks at a red light. Guess what, you aren’t going anywhere, so suck it up and enjoy the moment. Look around. Take in the view. Take a moment to breathe. Just be there. It will turn green. It might feel like a 30 minute red light, but that is just the stress clock running your life. It probably took a minute.

So the light turns green and the guy in front of you doesn’t take off like a horse leaving the gate at the Kentucky Derby. To that one minute light you have now added an additional 30 seconds of delay. The stress and anger grows. You honk. You yell. And if you are from NJ, you give them the one fingered salute. I won’t go in to the fact that this guy is the one who can’t quite hit the speed limit on the one lane road… By now you are wanting to climb over your steering wheel and reign some fire down on the car in front of you.

I took these three to talk about because each is an individual small stress that is added to by the next one. One small loss to stress leads to another, and so on. It builds and builds until it takes over.

Slow service and cable news are easy to fix too. I have so many friends in the restaurant business and I see them work hard every day. They work as hard as they can, yet the service is always too slow for one customer or another. God forbid you are stuck at a table for an extra ten minutes talking to the people you wanted to go out with. And leaving the stress of cable news behind was easy. I just don’t watch much of it anymore, and I realize that the stress they are able to sell is what makes them money.

I haven’t won the war with small stress and maybe I never will. But I win more battles than I lose now. At red lights I just take in the view around me or take a moment to breathe. If they guy ahead of me doesn’t floor it at green, I am happy I get a few extra seconds to enjoy whatever I am doing. If people talk loudly around me on a cell phone, I just laugh a little on the inside and go about my day. But there is the occasional red light that still trips me up, like a test or a slap in the face reminding me that stress is still there.

Once you start winning these small battles, you are more equipped to take on the big guns. I know a whole lot of stressed out people out there who are shocked at the fact that they are so stressed out by what is happening around us. It shows in people I don’t normally think of as stress balls. And it spreads like a really crappy redneck Netflix “documentary.” Yeah Tiger King, I am looking at you!

Here is my advice to you, and my advice to myself every day. It’s a new day. Take on the little stresses before the big guy. If you are out of coffee this morning. Hell no, we aren’t going there. If you wake up and it’s a rainy and windy day, and you want sun, just remember that the rain is important. The rain isn’t ruining your day, you are. If you wake up and your cat has dropped a human sized hairball on your bed right near your face? Laugh it off. If you can’t deal with a giant hairball, you are not going to be able to handle bigger stresses as they come at you.

And be like Happy Gilmore and find your happy place. To me there is nothing like time spent outside. Time spent enjoying nature. Obviously that is not happening very much these days, but I am not letting it destroy me. I am finding ways to enjoy nature. My friend Allan has a great blog about nature and Thoreau and I think you should read it: Thoreau’s Seasons It helps me to mentally be out in nature even if I can’t physically head out to hike and explore.

Maybe we are still in the stream series? How can you solve problems if stress rules the days? How can you learn if you are constantly put down by those stresses? The stress you feel should be a learning experience for you, and how you deal with it defines you. It should not be a life controlling experience though.

If you haven’t read the first two in this series:

https://stickneymusic.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/the-mind-emerging-from-the-streaming/

https://stickneymusic.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/hearing-the-running-stream/

Of to PT. Today’s goal is conquer stairs. I will attempt to be back at it later today with part 3, or is it part 4 now? I leave you with this quote you can start every day with from Present Moment, Wonderful Moment, by Thich Nhat Hahn

Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.