MY POST-CANADIAN QUEST

Today feels like the kind of day when there's no room for punctuation because everything is going at hundreds of miles an hour and it's almost impossible to see how things will slow down when there's so much to do and it's all speeding up and there's more and more to do and less and less time to do it in because everything is just spinning faster and faster and even my sentences don't seem to be able to find any commas to slow the pace or semicolons to stick the brakes on or anything other than the emergency method of yanking up the handbrake and squealing to a halt with a tyre-burning head-spinning dust-cloud-creating full stop.

Phew.

OK, so things are busy. I'm away next week; there is a lot to do to make sure that Louise can do whatever she needs to do while I'm off.

"You'll be looking forward to your holiday," said my Team Leader. I just smiled.

Next week is The Gathering - our church network camp. It's a lot of things but I'm not sure it counts as 'holiday' when you're playing keys in every session and trying to live in a tent for the rest of the time. Unfortunately, I don't have the following week to recover this year, so I'm going to have to find ways to chill through the whole five days and not let anybody stress me out.

So much for my post-Canadian quest to be more chilled. I thought it would just naturally happen if I didn't care quite so much about stuff, but it seems to be a bit more complicated than that. I think it's a lot to do with being better organised as well.

Another problem is that stress is quite infectious - if everybody around you is blowing up into angry clouds of frustration, it gets much harder to stay cool. Not that that's happening here particularly, but it could. It'd be like a kind of micro-culture - to fit in, to make our voice heard, we take on the atmosphere around us and join in with the heart-wobbling, desk-thumping, nerve-jangling frustration, when actually, the best thing to do (for everyone) is to slow it right down and do what you can to make it right. If stress is infectious, so must be the antidote.

That in itself feels like hard work, swimming against the tide of the micro-culture.

However, I'm a person who is supposed to change atmospheres, not to be changed by them, so I am (externally at least) trying my best to be ice-cool, friendly and calm under pressure.

I closed my eyes and thought of that day I wrote a poem by Lake Ontario. That was a really nice day. The water was shimmering under the hot sun, and it gently lapped against the rocks, tiny waves at the edge of a huge expanse of peace. This, I thought, is how to slow things down - a little perspective from 3,500 miles away and in the gentle folds of a recalled memory: a glimmering full stop on a beautiful day.

I can definitely do this.