Pain...

...and a happy ending

“Embrace stress, don’t avoid it. “

— Shane Parrish

Yeah…no. I tried that, Shane.

Embracing stress may work for you, but for me, it is like handing a five-year-old a lighter and telling him/her to go wild. And, as weird as this may sound to some of you, I think I handle stress relatively well. I am intimately familiar with it. That does not mean I want to slow dance with it.

Now that I have the snark out of my system, let me add some qualifiers. Stress hardens a person; toughens up your outer shell, making insurmountable things far more surmountable. Certain people, things, events are worth the stress. Some relationships are defined by stress and tension. That does not mean the relationship should be scrapped. It means some things just need to be worked on.

It all depends on the person(s) involved.

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.”

— Eckhart Tolle

This makes sense to me. Of course, Eckhart Tolle SHOULD make sense to me. I generally defer to people smarter than me on…almost everything.

However, I am a big believer, when depressed, to handle days in half hour chunks of time. It is manageable and definitely the “present.” It is pretty hard to be afraid of or nervous about something twenty minutes from now. I cannot say for sure my stressors and fears are caused by too much future. If anything, they are caused by too much past.

I am guilty of allowing my past to impact my future, and not in a good way. I can say with some certainty I was fired from one of the best jobs I ever had because I used “the” too often in some of my grant proposals.

I wish I could say I am exaggerating. I am not. If you write a lot or your job includes a lot of writing, try writing long-form pieces consciously trying to avoid “the” in any context.

For YEARS afterward, “the” was a trigger word for me. I would be writing something, inadvertently include a “the” in some sentence, and I would freeze for five minutes or more.

The past can cause IMMENSE stress and anxiety. So, tap the brakes, Eckhart Tolle. For me, the past has been prologue too often for me to find more comfort in that than in the future.

But I know people who run with Usain Bolt-like speed away from the future back to the past where they can find comfort in memories that may, in fact, be tainted by rose colored glasses. This can be frustrating, especially if their past is of a nebulous nature to you (meaning me) but which the other person is familiar with. The anxieties and fears you know are much easier to deal with than ones you have not experienced…or at least not those experienced beyond the next half hour.

“I’m traumatized
And I feel confined
I seem so unsettled
I don’t feel alive

No excitations
No good vibrations
Just a physical pain
Just a physical pain

Will I ever get to see you darling
This broken friendship
Means my broken heart
Are we ever gonna get together
Will I ever see your smiling face again
Can’t wait”

— Joan Armatrading, “Physical Pain”

I love Joan Armatrading. Her not being in the Rock Hall of Fame automatically discredits the entire institution. She can write songs about relationships better than most singer/songwriters, especially how frustration, anxieties, fears will cause…physical pain. Her narrator isn’t bemoaning the future; she’s HOPEFUL for the future and re-establishing a friendship that collapsed.

It does not even have to be relationships with another person…your relationship with a job, you entire family, or even a sports team. Physical pain is real when a relationship runs aground on the nearest beach. Ask any Premier League fan of some team not named Manchester City (or Arsenal – Go Gunners), what it feels like to be relegated to the lower division.

Navigating relationships is tough work. The ones worth keeping are going to include challenges, crevices, hopelessness (temporary) and, ultimately, some hope. It helps if the other person’s value is equally shared.

“Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kinda joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now, I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row”

— Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

I realize I am all over the map tonight. And I do not even have a particularly good reason to be this scattered. It’s Friday night (Saturday morning in some places), and maybe that is my only rationale, which is why “Desolation Row” makes sense tonight…and many nights. Bob Dylan has given MANY different answers about what this song means. The cleanest explanation is that “desolation row” represents a state of mind. Other critics have alluded to desolation row representing some kind of extra intelligence. I do not have a freaking clue. Sometimes, rolling one’s eyes and exhaling deeply is the only appropriate response to a Dylan song.

“Happy endings always made her cry. It was the relief.”

— Liane Moriarty

Amen to that.

How many of you believe in serendipity? I was offered (and I accepted) a job today that I am very much looking forward to. I wrote about reasons to believe last night. The reasons I hung my hat on last night…well, I think they worked. worked. Now, the tricky part…embracing the present and future while not stumbling back into the past. This is no easy task, and is, frankly, terrifying if I think more than 31 minutes into the future. Maybe Eckhart Tolle is right after all.

Just remember, Mark, to be sparse with how many times “the” appears in anything… literally ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING…I write.