Funny how Mondays are basically Mondays, even if I don’t go to work. I work three days a week, and my schedule is pretty flexible. Usually I go to work on Tuesday and Thursday, plus either Monday or Wednesday, but it varies. This leaves me time to myself and, theoretically, time to write.
My day filled up today, but most of the time it filled with a sort of grace, like a barrel of rainwater that will slough thirst on a drier day. There were just a few moments that threatened to unhinge. I want to explore one of these stress points.
It happened at about 5:30. I had invited T., M., and 4-year old S., former housemates who just this weekend moved out of the collective that B. and I left seven months ago, for dinner. I had asked T. on the phone whether she had any requests. I thought that since she knows my cooking — we lived together in the collective for two years — she might wish for something in particular. She didn’t have a request, she said, but she had an anti-request: something just slightly more elaborate than a plain grain, plain veggie, and rather plain tofu or bean dish. It took me a little time this morning to figure out what that might be, but one of my Most Important Things for today was to find a recipe that inspired me, and I was successful: bhangra burritos (without the tortilla) from the Rebar cookbook. Anyhow, T. had said they would come at about 4:30 to hang out and help me with dinner. We would eat at 6. At 4:50, they hadn’t yet arrived, and I decided I’d better start cooking.
I had fun cooking at the start. Here I have to explain that I don’t generally enjoy cooking. Maybe this is related to my difficult relationship with food in general (see yesterday’s post), but most of the time I find cooking tedious and time-consuming and intellectually unstimulating. Perhaps I might want to consider the value of included intellectually unstimulating activities in my day (in contrast to the intellectually stimulating — overstimulating? — mind-number activities of interwebs surfing). Hmm. Anyhow, I started out dicing potatoes, which went faster than I anticipated. I made a puree of red peppers, tomatoes, garlic and ginger, which to my delight tasted somewhat like gazpacho. Makes sense, really, but I was surprised. I was making great time, no need to hurry. This is fun! I’m making stuff!
Then T., M. and S. arrived, at about 5:15. The air crackled with the static of relationships. Hugs and hellos, and S. wanted to show me her new violin. I was still cooking, cooking, as we chatted, three conversations at once. Then at 5:30 I remembered suddenly that I hadn’t put the rice on yet. I had wanted to prepare brown rice. Stress point. There wasn’t time to make brown rice. And I didn’t really have time to make rice; all of my concentration that wasn’t attending to the stove was being mopped up in conversation. I grabbed the white rice jar, threw the parts of the rice cooker together, and handed it all over to T. “Please make rice!” I instructed, and she did. But the rest of my cooking time I was on low simmer, not boiling over with stress but it was taught under my skin. Every move I made felt slightly harried, like the meal was wresting control from me: it was going to take it’s own damn time, thanks. No matter how much I wanted the dinner on the table on my timeline, the food was going to be ready when it was ready. At this point in the game, I couldn’t recalibrate the schedule, I couldn’t change the plan, I just had to play and see what happened.
And then I looked at the clock again, and it was 5:45. The main dish was done, the rice was well on its way. I had pre-chopped, pre-washed salad greens in the fridge; I put them in a wooden bowl. The stress melted off me. I had plenty of time, and if the rice wasn’t ready exactly at 6, well, it would be ready shortly after, and besides, that was totally out of my control, so why worry about it?
My relationship to stress isn’t straightforward. My grade 10 biology teacher — my favorite teacher ever — once exclaimed, “Yael, you are a bundle of nerves!” Really? A bundle of nerves? That’s not me. Passionate, yes. High strung, no. Then later, when I was approaching a tight deadline at work when I lived in Boston, a few years after college, a colleague burst out laughing when I said, suddenly, “Oh, I am so stressed!” “You are? You don’t even sound stressed when you say that!” I was surprised by both of these incidents because I realized people had impressions of me that didn’t accord with how I felt about myself.
I think these days I am more of a bundle of nerves that I have been at other times in my life. Maybe Mrs. B. was right; maybe she could see it even back then when I was 15. I am a sleeping tooth-gnasher and a headache sufferer. I have a chronic knot under one shoulder-wing, have had it for years now. I get intellectually paralyzed when I’m scared of a task and can spend hours mindlessly web-surfing (or playing sudoku — really, hours! — until I blocked the website where I played).
Today was relatively stress-free, and I think that’s what has helped me identify this stress point. Usually the stress in my day would ebb and flow throughout, as I tried working on overwhelming and time-sensitive tasks. It’s funny — my job is really not time-sensitive, except I make it so by procrastinating. This connects to the practice vs. project thinking that I wrote about yesterday: if I could sustain a practice orientation, more things would get done in a day-to-day flow. Tasks wouldn’t take on an all-or-nothing tint as I race against the clock to get them done in time.
I set three “Most Important Things” that I wanted to do today. They were pretty simple things, and I did them all. Morning exercises, looking up a recipe that inspired me (it was yummy!), and spending time on my writing. I wrote for quite a while, actually, using a new tool: Write or Die. You have to check it out. It’s a little punitive in approach, and sometimes I was irritated by the screen going from pale pink to red as it urged me to get writing again — I’m thinking! Let me think! — but it was tremendously successful at keeping me going to my writing goal. These three MITs were not overwhelming, especially given the roomy spacious day I had as their container. There were, of course, other things I had to do today as well. Grocery shopping, laundry, cook dinner, answer a few emails. So what? I did them. I got more done today than most days. I’m going to pick three more MITs for tomorrow. And watch for the stress points. If I can identify them as they are happening and take the time to breathe, I can probably prevent them from taking over my experience, from a stress point to a stress landslide. Instead, from a stress point to a blossoming.
Let’s see how tomorrow goes. I’m curious.
