Just a little reminder for everyone, at the end of the weekend…
And listen, I've got a question: Do you think stress can honestly be eliminated? Not in the world, perhaps, but at least in your own life? I'm always struck when I see references to "stress management" (as though we have already surrendered to its inevitability) when I think I would prefer a cultural discussion based upon "stress annihilation."
As a driven, anxious, repressed Calvinist, stress has been part of my life since earliest childhood memory, and it has only been in recent years that I've watched it, at times, finally begin to ebb. Some of this is due, I think to simple maturity — to getting better at the craft of living. Some of it has been about learning to say no. Some of it has been about learning how to better take care of my own health. Some of it has been FINALLY inching toward a recognition that other people's lives belong to them — and that relationships tend to function more smoothly when I back away a bit. (Emotional over-reach has been a huge stressor in my own history.) Some of it is due to having lived long enough to know that life moves in cycles and seasons, and that if you wait out the drama, things will slowly return to their center.
But I'm still totally capable of losing my shit at times over basically nothing, just to be clear. Gotta keep working on that.
So tell me how you have all come to handle your own stresses in your own lives? Share techniques. Let's hear each other out. This thing is a killer — a literal killer (disease and misery surf into our shores upon tides of stress, I believe) — and I would love to know how you all manage it…or, better, annihilate it!
Big heart,
Liz
