Lessons on Stress

Who knew that stress was cumulative?

We’ve known for years that my body is a vehicle powered by stress. For some reason, I thought this activity was burning off the stress — like the gas that keeps vanishing from the tank of my car. Turns out that wasn’t the case. (Stop laughing at how obvious that is to the rest of you. It was a shock to me.)

So…one more drop of stress got put into the stress tank…and my “done” valve popped just like the turkey I didn’t cook for Christmas.

I’ve spent days looking through all of the barrels of stress that I’d managed to pour into that tank. It had been super-compressed so that it was like the super-compressed liquid Hydrogen that used to power the space shuttle, back when we had a space program. Which we don’t have any more. Yes, that was one of the drops of stress in my life. I worked for NASA back when I was young, watched some of the earliest signs that things were going downhill for that program. But it is all good — they’re privatizing the program. Maybe someone needs a technical support writer for one of those ventures.

See, I’m easy to side-track these days.

The stress has been analyzed and decompressed. There’s bits of stress all over the place here. We’re talking a mess…but at least the mess is on the outside. I’m amazed at how much better I feel.

It is a new year. I didn’t plan on re-making myself for 2011, but it seems to have happened anyway, like a butterfly breaking out of a chrysalis.

I’m not a “new-me” — just a more free me. And I like it.

No more holding stress on the inside. You may want to be careful around me, though. I’m learning how to off-load that stress and sometimes it flies around like shrapnel falling to the ground after the Challenger blew up.