Rest more

I took an afternoon nap today – between ironing shirts.

tired

Tal Ben-Shahar (that Harvard professor whose course on happiness drew the largest enrollment in the undergraduate catalog) suggests that stress, in itself, is not bad – noting that stress can even make us stronger and more resilient. As he sees it, the problem is that folks do not know how to recover from stress, so he focuses his attention on stress recovery.

He recommends:
1. Micro-breaks – mini breaks of a few minutes, or a few hours throughout the day.
2. Mezzo breaks – Getting enough sleep at night and taking a day off here and there. Research has shown that folks who take a day off a week are healthier and more creative.
3. Macro breaks – Weeks, or even months. Most of us do not have the opportunity to take months off at a time, but he recommends taking that week, or two-week vacation.

OK, back to work!

until I got home this afternoon. I’m now about to take myself upstairs to lounge on my bed for an hour or so to recuperate with white tea with ginger and a book

I haven’t slept in so late in a long long time. It was a highly stressful weekend, and I didn’t come in until midnight last night.

I’m just loafing about the house right now; hard to imagine the early morning rising I’m going to have to do on the morrow.

After 10 weeks of being able to sleep in until 6:30 or even 7:00 if I wanted, it’s back to up at 5:30 again.

It’s 8:50, and I feel like I can barely move. I do need to stay awake and alert, though, because I need to pick up the girls from their event tonight.

This quote really reverberated with me:

Most of you are probably familiar with the gear-shifting mechanism of manual transmission automobiles. If you are in first gear and wish to change into second, you must fully shift into the neutral gear first. If you do not, your car will make a lot of noise and you will perhaps damage the gears. In order to change the patterns of your life, either personally or in the larger whole, there needs to be a moving into the neutral zone from time to time to get a clear look at what has been creating the problems and what some new solutions might be.

I need to be in neutral from time to time.

I am lighting a candle tonight at services – I hope I manage to remain awake. I’m lighting in honor of my 10th year at this particular congregation.

Really, I want to just do the sudoku and the crossword and watch silly things on the TV this weekend. That’s all. It would be nice to be rested enough to feel like I have the energy to ride my bike, too. But this weekend I have laundry and grocery shopping. And I also have so much work-work to do.

• a twelve hour day yesterday
• the auction website just went live this afternoon and the bugs are being called in
• clients calling, calling, calling
• a board member wants to know why I haven’t made the email-able auction invitation yet, and no, a link to the new auction website is not adequate
• why haven’t I gotten the materials for slide show ready yet? The volunteer who said he’d do it is flying to New Zeeland and why haven’t I gotten the photos to him yet?
• another board member can’t figure out how to sort an excel spreadsheet – I need to sort it for him and re-send it to him
• a volunteer just called, and I was talking to him while the phone was ringing again, from god knows who

As usual, I’m the only one here. So tired.