Today My Meditation Skills Will Get A Work Out

I think I need some stress free time.  As usual it seems that the world is spinning around me though I am in a relatively stable place.  I guess it is invoking a sense of vertigo which is probably combined with a sense of helplessness from being unable to influence that spin.  The end result is a tight stomach and a very active monkey mind.  Today is no exception.  The monkey mind started on waking and walked right into the shower with me, then sort of hung around and poked at me through breakfast.

I always wonder why I let it get inside of me and bother me like that?  These are things that I have minimal influence over. About all I can do is extend a helping hand and even then that can only have an influence if someone reaches out and accepts the hand.  Otherwise, I am left spinning with my hands extended, wanting to help but unable.  From there, I continue to spin until my stress levels get very high.

I find myself almost continually writing about my stress here.  I guess at some point this became my stress journal.  That is not necessarily a bad thing because usually, like now, writing about my stress allows me to process it and move through it more smoothly without bottling it up and feeling the pressure build inside of me.  Still, between the work and non-work stress I’m banging off the walls pretty hard.

Here as the office the main stressor is generally the fact that we remain overbooked for work.  The classic dilemma of too much work and not enough hands.  Add on top of that the lack of process discipline from the top down and it sometimes feels to me like it’s a recipe for disaster of one form or another.  We seem to be unable to influence the decisions that are made that influence our daily lives.  That is not just a perception, but rather what happens when you find yourself in a top down micro-managed world. I keep expecting those above us to wake up at some point and realize how much damage they’re doing to the company, but I don’t see it.  I think they are managing to hide the self-inflicted damage inside the outer turmoil in our working environment.

Then, in the off work stress the main thing that is in front of me is my pending relocation to South Dakota for an extended period to help care for my step-father following his hip surgery.  He has a meeting today to get images taken and then a meeting tomorrow with the surgeon, from which point they are going to schedule the surgery.  Oddly enough that is also a stress point.  There is a possibility that the actual surgery itself is tomorrow - I don’t think so - but it is possible.  This possibility exists because they scheduled the appointment and no one though to ask details about what was going to happen in each appointment.

I’ll survive all the stress of course.  It mainly is what it is and since there is little that I can do to influence it, it’s definitely an exercise in zen detachment.  I sometimes seem to come up short in that exercise, but I suppose that is the learning cycle.  Today is going to be another exercise in detachment or attempted detachment. I am sure that I am going to have to put my meditation skills to good work today!