Old Mortality

I used to pride myself on being someone who rarely gets stressed out.  I've been thinking in recent days, though, that there's a difference between managing stress well and finding ways to minimize the stressors of everyday life.

I'm excellent at minimizing stressors.  I'm married to a man who stabilizes me, provides me with a firm foundation, and gives me a soft place to land.  We live within our means, we work to save money, and we pay all of our bills on time.  In my work, I plan ahead, schedule my time, and refuse to procrastinate.  I'm fortunate to work in a field where the work is always rewarding, even though it is always demanding.  I surround myself with people I can depend on-- people who help me carry my burdens rather than adding to them.  Whenever I can, I do favors for other people.  I really don't "sweat the small stuff."  I keep a friendly, cheerful dog in my home who reminds me of life's simple pleasures.  I have an exercise routine that generally keeps me healthy in mind and body.

I was thinking about how, in high school physics, one of the projects is the egg drop.  It's as though I've crafted an excellent egg carrier around myself.  My egg doesn't crack from life's drops.  My classmates frequently say things to me like I don't know how you do it all, which kind of reminds me of the reaction I had when someone in my physics class designed an egg drop carrier that protected his egg.  He said "I just built it in a way that made sense to me."  I really can't imagine going about my life in any other way.

Dealing with Dad's death, though, has been too high of a drop for my egg carrier.  I feel like my egg is cracked.  I no longer feel like someone who manages stress well.  I am sometimes amazed at my lack of productivity on my work-from-home days.  All I did today was read one article and fifty pages of fiction? How is that possible?  I feel like I've been working all day, I think.  Then I remember that on every work from home day, there are also emails to send, phone calls to make, and questions to look into regarding Dad's affairs.  There are also moments when I find myself staring off or mindlessly surfing the internet, unaware of how sidetracked I've let myself get.

So I was thinking about how I might carry the analogy all the way through.  My egg is cracked, but it's not crushed.  I still manage to get something accomplished every day.  Then I started to think, Well, what good is an uncracked egg, anyway?  You can't actually use it for anything.  It's not fertilized, so if you never crack it, it will just spoil.  A crushed egg is pretty useless, too.  You can't sort out egg from shell, and it's all mashed into the carrier.  Maybe a cracked egg is the best, actually, because you can turn it into an omelette or scrambled eggs or something.  (Dad loved to make both.)  Maybe this means I'll have to spend some more time in this frying pan before I'm transformed into something positive.

Today's a work-from-home day, so there are phone calls to be made, emails to send, and questions to be looked into.  Thankfully, though, there's also a lot of Katherine Anne Porter to read-- "Old Mortality," in fact.  Three classes this semester means three research projects/papers, and I've decided that two of them will be on Porter.  I'm trusting that KAP, along with the other usual features of my egg carrier, will carry me through.