My yoga class was packed last night. We kept shifting our mats around to make room for latecomers. There must have been 40+ people squeezed into that little studio. The teacher was confused and asked if there was some kind of event going on that she wasn’t aware of. Someone called out, “No, we’re just stressed!” Ha. That’s certainly why I was there. The semester is in full swing now, and the amount of work standing between me and Commencement Day on May 23 is enormous. Meanwhile, we're launching several new projects at work, and watching the Olympics every night has not helped me to relax. I hold my breath each time we turn on the TV, hoping I’m not about to see some career-ending fall on the halfpipe or crash on the ice.There’s so much potential for devastating injury (not to mention heartbreak/crushed dreams) in these events. I don’t remember the Summer Olympics being so hard to watch. Are the winter games more dangerous, or am I just on edge? These kinds of things don’t seem to happen in swimming. (Actually, the high dive makes me a little nervous.)
I don’t like to use the word “stress” because I feel that its constant repetition (stress stress STRESS!) both adds to the collective burden of anxiety and somehow implies that it’s normal to feel this way, that everyone is always overworked and undernourished. There's a series of ads on the T right now for some kind of one-minute dinner product, and the copy says things like, "This rice is in an even bigger hurry than you are!" There are even streaks drawn behind the box of rice to show that it's rushing around. Bleh. But there's no denying that I do feel some stress right now. Going to yoga this week helped. And I (accidentally) slept for ten and a half hours on Wednesday night, which felt great.
A bright spot in all of this has been the weather this past week. Yes, we lost power on Thursday night, and the streets were flooded for days. But we've hardly had any snow (just a flurry here and there, nothing that stuck), and the sun came out on Friday morning, giving me hope that spring may indeed come again. I can’t wait. Last spring, I wrote down the flowers I saw each month so that I would know what to look for this year. In March, there were snow drops, then crocuses and pansies, followed in April by irises, forsythia, hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, and magnolias. Hard to believe that’s right around the corner, isn’t it?
