Spring Always Comes. Breathe

BREATHE!

“Each breath is like a little rebirth, a renaissance that can only be celebrated if we recognize that it’s happening. “

-Cristen Rodgers.

A dear friend called me yesterday, desperately unhappy because her job is rejecting remote work, which she has enjoyed since the Pandemic. If she goes in to work, it will throw off a variety of important life factors (deliberately Vaguebooking here) and the quality of life will suffer.

She could see no answer, and hoped I would have one.

I asked how long she had to devise an answer, how long before the situation was set in concrete. She estimated a week.

Great. Then the first and best thing to do is to BREATHE. Find the center of the storm. The Five Minute Miracle breathing (sixty seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing at the top of the hour) is like pouring water on the little flaming demon that SCREAMS that you have to do something NOW NOW NOW.

No. You don’t. One of the really ugly things about fear and stress is that it motivates you to do what is IMPERATIVE (run in a circle with your hair on fire) rather than what is IMPORTANT (calm yourself, see what the situation is, look at your resources, use your problem-solving strategies).

The saddest, sickest thing is that the actions necessary to both solve problems and build up a surplus of energy, reserves of reciprocal emotional support with friends, or financial abundance are…