THE TRAIN DRIVER AND THE LITTLE BALL OF WORRY

I felt really sick this morning. I'm not ill, just feeling upside-down.

The meeting was a shambles. I lost the plot of what I was supposed to be doing, got flustered by an IT issue and couldn't calculate 29 x 0.75 even with a calculator staring up at me from the desktop. My mind was a chasm.

I've rarely felt so baffled. I'm learning a lot about myself though. Here's a thing:

I don't like it when my train of thought is interrupted.

I don't like it. The signals switch, the tracks change and I'm off at high speed in the wrong direction.

The worst of it is that it's always very helpful people who do the point-switching. They're not being malicious or trying to show me up, or anything devious at all; they're just trying to get to where I'm going. And I'm snapping at those nice people in the echoing chamber inside my head.

Unfortunately, the longer the meeting went on (and it overran by thirty minutes) the more hopeless at running it I was becoming. In the end I was just racing to get to the end, no matter how much of a disaster it was turning out to be to get there.

"Right, are we done?" said someone as I lost connection to the network for the fifth time. My heart sank with the corners of my mouth as everyone trooped dolefully out. I was left alone with a disconnected laptop, a notebook and a pile of unused post-its.

That's another thing I don't enjoy much - mechanical things that go wrong for no reason.

I can't drive at the moment because I found out the other day that my wiper blades don't work. I phoned up the garage this morning.

"Hang on I'll just check," said the pleasant-sounding lady at the other end. She was using cockney vowels but trying to hide it. There was a muffled silence while she asked someone, presumably a mechanic, about whether or not he wanted to fix my car. It turned out that he did - but not until Wednesday.

I think it's a case of control issues.

Somewhere deep within, I must believe myself to be a train-driver - in complete control of engine, carriages, steam-box and track; I can't bear the fact that sometimes there's a person about to switch the line up ahead, sending me swerving off-course.

Similarly, when little things go wrong, I'm utterly disappointed with myself for being unable to fix them. I look at my windscreen wipers stuck half-way up my windscreen and twiddle the lever, pointlessly. They taunt me by doing absolutely nothing other than collecting crunchy leaves along the blades. For some reason, this makes me disproportionately sad.

I need to learn how to let go of these things and take some positive action. After all, there are lots more things, bigger things, to get upset about.

It occurs to me then, that this is all part of the ongoing quest of learning how to rest. I spend a lot of time carrying around a little ball of worry deep inside me. The little ball of worry won't let me rest until it's fully untangled; it won't allow me to relax until it has unwound itself and all is just a long strand of simplicity. But computers go wrong, meetings disintegrate and there are always going to be leaves on the line and knots in the wool.

I flicked the laptop shut and shuffled the post-its into my rucksack, ready to head back to my desk and get on with some work.

There has to be a way to rest, ignoring the little ball of worry and ignoring the train track, and ignoring those mechanical faults I can't do anything about. Maybe I need to hand the driving over to Someone Else.