Thursday, December 15, 2011

Making a shift

Wow.  Well, it's been a LONG time since I've sat down to write.  Life gets too crazy sometimes.

Finally the pace of my life caught up to me and my body said "ENOUGH!"  In other words, I got sick.  I'm in my recovery period now and I always find that after I've been sick enough to slow the hell down, my life shifts a little. 

So I sat down to get a few thoughts off my mind and came across a few blog entries that I had started and never finished.  Wow.  The things I was thinking about a few months ago are coming to focus again. 

This is from an entry started in the summer....

"Our latest drama is we're buying a house!  Exciting?  Yes.  Stressful?  Also yes.


Why is it that even good changes make us stressed?


I just spent three days in one of the most beautiful places on earth - Jasper National Park.  I had a lovely time.  I relaxed for the first time in ages and yet when I returned home, the stress came back.  It felt weird to not have stress.  It was like my brain sought out something to be worried about.  I have become habituated to stress and worry.


How many other feelings do we experience out of force of habit?  Habit is a very powerful thing.  Have you ever driven home from work with a distracted mind and got home not remembering anything about the drive? It was as if you were on auto-pilot?  I think many of us do this more often than we know.  We have habituated certain behaviours and we don't even realize we're doing them."

Three or four months later and my brain is still in the process of making the shift.  The major stressors in my life are finally gone.  It's hard to grasp.  I'm still living my life in quasi-crisis mode, just waiting for the other shoe to fall.  My consciousness hasn't caught up with my new reality yet.

So what am I doing about it?  Nothing.  I spent several fruitless days (okay, weeks) trying to snap from one reality into a new one, but it wasn't working.  My logical mind knew that the stress was over and now I should be getting on with the business of creating my life, but how?  What to do?  I had no clue.  And that frustrated the hell out me!  I hate sitting still.  So I pushed.  Instead of allowing myself to transition gracefully and slowly into a new reality and give myself time to think about what I wanted my future to look like, I tried to make something come to mind.  Well, that's about as productive as standing over a flower and shouting "grow dammit!"