Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

I'll Just Stick with Coal

I am not a person who handles pressure well and I try to avoid stress as much as possible. However, we live in a fast track world and I don't believe we can live a stress free life. Sometimes unavoidable circumstances arise that add stress and the pressure that goes with it.

I try to prioritize my life by order of importance, such as family, career, and house. I then allot my time accordantly and usually manage to have some me time as well. In spite of this master plan every so often, an emergency will arise in one of the lesser important aspects of my life, such as my job, or a home repair. It doesn't take much to make my house of cards, nee my life, to come tumbling down. One weekend comes to mind where required overtime and soccer finals collided, and all of a sudden I was spread too thin to get everything covered. How do you make a child understand that you can't be two places at once and yet, he was far more understanding than my boss was.

The stress brought on by circumstances such as these creates a pressure on me that feels as if a giant weight was pressing down on my chest. I kept running the situation through my mind searching for the answer, causing sleep to elude me. My solution was a compromise that like most compromises made both parties unhappy. I informed my boss that I could only work a partial shift due to prior commitments making him accuse me of not being a, 'team player'. I made it to my son's game but not until the last quarter so I missed his goal in the first but saw his team give up two to lose the game. He was desolate and turned his anger to me for not being there to cheer the team on.

As I look back on this weekend, I realize that by trying to keep all parties happy all I ended up doing was adding pressure to my life and pleasing no one. Knowing that sometimes schedules collide does not ease the pressure or the strife and to just deal with it is not an option I seem capable of doing. I know, 'Pressure makes diamonds,' but I feel the riches of a relaxed lifestyle are worth more than diamonds or gold.

More writing by this author

Blogs on This Site