No Surrender

It is the last weekend before the new semester starts, before the new spring, and I am desperate for change and for the ability to handle what's coming. Stress is the worst thing in my life, and though I feel completely adept at hiding my stress, it seems impossible to shut myself off from its experience, or to even diminish the experience. It is the reason for all my discomfort.

I do not place blame on stress, however, but rather on my own lack of self discipline in the face of stress. I have great plans for how to cope, but instead decide to buy a six-pack and watch TV, late at night when I get off work. And repeat, repeat. The cycle makes me so depressed that even the most basic meditation exhausts me, and each day I give up more easily. And repeat, repeat.

So of course, one of the bigger themes of my New Year's Resolutions is Find Ways to Better Deal with Stress. And I know what these art: more art, more exercise, improved diet, develop a more disciplined spiritual practice, more play, reading, imagination, meditation. Less booze, less smoking, (stop both...), less time non-productively spent on a computer, the end of procrastination. The end of feeding the strength of my stress by obsessing over it, worrying so much about how to handle it that I never actually do.

I believe there is a level of force required to defeat stress, and perhaps one of the simplest things is to force yourself to be positive. Punch through the mirror and declare, I am changing, I am making progress, there is evidence of these things. And I hope that this evidence will come to make up a portion of the meaningful content in this blog: how my puppy is growing into one of the sweetest dogs I've ever known (and how I'm starting to teach him some agility!), how I'm changing my diet and eating Mediterranean, low glycemic index meals, how I'm getting out more to photograph what I might begin calling "speed portraits":

I'm trying to spend more time with a variety of people, I'm cooking more at home again, on the weekends when I don't have work until the evening, I take some time to go to the gym. I snuggle more with my cat, I took Tuesdays off my work availability in order to attend more discussions with a local philoso-religious group I've known for a long time. I'm trying to laugh more without holding back. 

Anne Rice said, "The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half-strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation." I feel as though for some time, my laughter has sounded more like the latter, and I refuse for that to continue to be so. There are no more excuses nor justifications for surrendering to stress.