ELEPHANTS ON DRAWING PINS

It was stressful before I took my coat off.

I slipped out of my rucksack, unwrapped my scarf and slung it over the back of my chair. This is Day 643 and so far, it's not been a lot of fun.

Stress, the physical property, is a sort of force per unit area. It results in strain, which is the deforming or changing-shape of an object under stress.

Imagine an elephant tiptoeing on a drawing pin. The surface area of the pin is small, while the force exerted by the elephant is enormous. The resulting pressure, or stress, is huge. Thinking about it, that's also why high heels get stuck in soft mud. In other words, you need something heavy pushing something very small to create stress.

So, in my case, the stress is caused by, well, let's call them things-to-do. They could include other people's expectations, perhaps reputation and a need to be vaguely liked or popular. These are a pile of heavy things - elephants, toppling up on top of each other like an old-fashioned circus act.

The pin, the surface area, the thing that amplifies the stress because it's so tiny, is the amount of time there is to complete those things-to-do without compromising quality or credibility.

Stress increases when the heavy things get heavier or the small thing gets smaller, just like a fraction gets bigger when you increase the top number or decrease the bottom one ... or both. Tick tock.

So, how could you reduce it? What could you do to alleviate the stress? If it really is force per unit area, elephants per pin, or heavy stuff per tiny thing, there are only two solutions:

(1) fewer elephants
(2) bigger drawing pin

I've been asking myself which of those is easier to organise. Fewer elephants means delegating or prioritising or just admitting that it can't be done. There are obvious problems with all three options. A bigger pin means extending a deadline, which is not always too practical, or playing around with time... which is of course, even less practical.

There is another option though, and that is to start asking why on earth we're balancing elephants on drawing pins in the first place. This one's all about perspective - it asks the 'why' question rather than the 'how'... and that's a really good thing to do, I think. After all, if there's one thing that stress does, it locks you into the situation until you can't see the outside world at all.

It feels counter-intuitive, but actually, a bit of perspective might really help. I'm going to take a step back from the circus for a moment, gain a bit of perspective and start asking myself who really appreciates elephants on drawing pins, how I got to be the elephant trainer in the first place, and why we're doing it.

And anyway, why am I comparing everything to elephants all of a sudden?