I don’t know about you, but around the holidays I feel like I, and not my dinner, am the one being stuffed into a pressure cooker.
I’m lucky to be able to take vacation time from my job at the end of the year, but getting ready to go on vacation? Those few days more than compensate for whatever stress-release I might soon enjoy. It’s like some unseen hand intends to pack the regular workday stress I’ll forfeit on those vacation days into the two or three days preceding my departure. Somehow, as I rush to get this email out or complete that report, I forget that I’m not, say, in charge of nuclear non-proliferation or global pandemic response. Whatever I have to leave on my desk is not going anywhere, has no grave impacts on anyone, will be just fine without me. But I crank up the pressure –“you’ll relax more if you don’t have this waiting for you to come back”–as if I need to add a second helping of guilt for not maximizing my vacation.
I’ve got my day job to tend to, my book to revise, a newsletter that hasn’t gone out in months, plus gifts to prepare for neighbors and friends, shopping to finish, and end-of-the-year activities that should be pleasurable–concerts and performances, parties, that sort of thing. All of these things I enjoy by themselves, but this time of year they end up feeling like one obligation after another.
Yesterday I realized I didn’t have anything to write about for this week. That pushed me over the edge. I sat in the allergist’s office getting my regular shot (for bee venom, so I can keep on with my beekeeping hobby), and worked myself into a low-grade panic about everything I had to get done.
As I stewed, other patients trickled into the waiting room. “Well, hey there!” they said. “How are you doing?” Everyone around me seemed to know each other. That’s weird, I thought. Most of the time when I come to the allergist, nobody talks to anyone. But here I sat amid six random people, an accidental crasher at their mini-reunion.
A few of them wore masks over their faces. Maybe they’ve got colds, I thought. Nice of them not to share with everyone before the holidays. Then one of the women excused herself to take a call on her cell phone. From overhearing her one-sided story (I couldn’t help it! I was trapped!), I learned that she and the man next to her were there from Florida. (I’m in North Carolina). They’d been here a month. And the man next to her, wearing the face mask, had had an organ transplant.
A woman sitting on the opposite wall turned to the woman next to her, also wearing a mask. “Did you get a room in the new wing? We just got discharged two days ago.” The masked woman mumbled something. “Those new rooms are nice. So much bigger. We were in the old part and the doctors literally had to climb over the equipment. Tell me where you’re from again?”
One couple was from Florida, one from south Georgia, near Savannah. “Oh! We stayed there on our way up here,” said the lady on the cell phone as she was put on hold. “It’s so beautiful.” I didn’t hear where the third couple was from, but I presume they weren’t local.
“What was yours?” the phone lady asked the woman from south Georgia.
“Ours was a double,” she replied, “and they also did a mitral valve replacement.”
A double–did that mean a double bypass? A double lung transplant? Whatever the case, everyone around me was wading through the aftermath of a major surgical procedure.
They had befriended each other as they sat in waiting rooms like this one, or perhaps they’d been in neighboring hospital rooms, passing each other on the floor as their patients walked laps to get their lungs working, to stave off embolisms and pneumonia and bedsores and to begin the slow path to discovering their new-normal life. The recently-discharged couple, not yet free to return home, attended a local high school’s production of A Christmas Carol. They had no stake in the production, didn’t know any of the performers. I suppose it gave them a way to get out into the community at little expense (a blessing, considering what they’d been through), and reconnect with life outside hospital walls.
Relax and refocus
This afternoon I’m going to a funeral of a woman who died way too young–in her 40s, from breast cancer, leaving behind twins in high school and a middle schooler. As I drove home from the allergist, the waiting room conversations and the pending funeral reminded me of the way life can force a slowdown. In those moments, life funnels out everything extraneous, so the energy that drips through is the energy you need to focus on the only issue that truly matters: the care of your loved ones, the care of yourself in tandem. Everything else–the projects at work, the reports and exams and the banana bread for your neighbors that’s not going to bake itself–is manufactured crisis.
When I got home, I curled up on the sofa with the dog and a cup of tea. I made a list of the little stressors nagging at me. I drank the tea and read a news story I’ll share on Friday that broke me down in the very best kind of tears, tears of gratitude and hope and wonder. And then, rather than succumbing to my custom of stress-eating cheese until guilt forces me to stop, I went about my day at an intentional plod. Focusing deeply on the task at hand, even if the task was chopping onions to throw in the slow cooker, I breathed. Any time I felt the panic rising, I made a cup of tea and sat with the dog.
Slowing down willingly–unforced by crisis–feels like a luxury, but it doesn’t have to be one. All the stress and pressure of holidays or work projects is manufactured. Sometimes we hold one another in that manufactured stress. Bosses don’t always understand if the report’s not on their desk by the end of the day. Grandparents demand to know why they haven’t gotten your Christmas card yet. A neighbor gives you an unexpected gift, and we wonder if they’re wondering why you haven’t yet given one in return. But we can release others from obligations and pressures, be kinder and gentler to our work colleagues and friends. And we can try to release ourselves from those pressures, too. That’s the hardest work of all, but we’re the ones who need it most.
