Good old Lena
Lena Horn said it is not the burden that wears you down but the way you carry it. I started this summer travel by writing in a travel journal that I brought with me two years ago when I had a sabbatical and went to Hungary and Croatia. The travelogue begins this way: I’m running away from my life.
That statement isn’t entire accurate because I love my life and I’m not running away but each time I’ve left the country it has been on the heels of a major stress attack that has built up over time. Anxiety and stress do not just happen, they take time to simmer, percolate, bubble, boil over. And that is what a year in the life of my work is like for me. One day builds on another till I feel that I am a boiling cauldron of stress. Then vacation – poof – days into it I become another person. A person who is present in the moment, without monkeys on my shoulders scratching at my face, screeching in my ears, sticking monkey paws up my nose till I can’t breathe.
The question is if you keep writing the same thing in your journal and you keep waiting till your time off to take a deep breath – what does that say about your life? How can you love to do something that basically snuffs out your ability to do everything else.
These are questions I need answers to.