Today has the potential to be super stressful. It’s delivery day for our ‘kitchen pod’ and although the delivery slot is fixed, although we’ve asked them about drainage and power and water, there are still multiple probabilities multiplying around this event.
Sometimes I feel like Sherlock you know, only not as smart. The equations and probabilities spin around my head, giving me at least the feel of what I should do next, to avoid what I fear later. But in this stressful season, those equations change much faster than I can process them. Right now, it seems almost inevitable that I’ll miscalculate and that my creative adaptableness, that art I’ve relied on my entire life, will lead me inexorably to disappointment tonight.
Stress eh. It builds up in my chest. My stomach rises and my heart sinks; my knuckles turn white and my face drains to grey and lined. It’s as though my body has rerouted all its power to keep my blood pounding like a marching drum - which I suppose it has. That’ll be cortisol trying to keep me alive in the middle of the fight or flight.
When the equations do flicker faster than I can see them, the possible outcomes aren’t really calculable any more. That’s what I meant the other day by the pathway of unpredictables: you lose control of the safety and certainty of the situation, and nature takes over the ride. But worse than falling, you do still have some control over what you do in the middle of it; just no time to process whether your choices will help or hinder, push you where you need to be, or swing you into somewhere you could have avoided. I need grace, I think.
Most stress seems to be about fear of loss of control. I might ponder that today. Sherlock had control of the cases he worked on because his mind allowed him to process the data quickly and accurately. He observed and processed, calculated and deduced with the speed of a chess grandmaster. But he’s also fictional. And the author of the story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was really the one who had control of the situation, not Sherlock.
I need to learn this, I think. I need to remember that the world isn’t necessarily a network of random chances, or equations that need to be solved. Nothing was ever unpredictable to the Author. I think that’s a pretty good thought for an incredibly stressful day.
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