Stress, distress and longing for all to be well

I am writing this for all the people I know who are really struggling right now. The hazard of coming to care about lots of people is that some of them, inevitably, will hit rough patches. Life is like that. You can't outsmart it and you can't outrun it. Somethings just hit you from the blind side.

So what do you do when life shakes you up and scrambles your ability to find even a moment of peace and rest? What happens next when tomorrow might not be better than today? It's easy to talk about staying positive. It's hard to do when you're tracing the course of an emotional tsunami. Sometimes you can see the wave and sometimes it is building deep under the surface.

If you can't fight, float.

I don't know what that means to you, but you do. You know that fighting is eating up energy you need. You know that fighting is generalizing so that you are doing combat with the wrong things or the wrong people. You know that you don't want to fight. You want to live in flow. You want to float.

And you can. If you're reading this because you are stressed and distressed and longing for all to be well, you know that you can float. You can breathe and let yourself be carried. You can notice that your mind is quick and awake and watching for the moment when movement will help. Until then, work with the flow. Even when it means that you get to hurt - congruently and terribly and usefully. If pain were not useful we would cease to experience it.

I don't know what you will learn except that you will learn that you can handle more than you thought you could and that you have better friends than you thought you had and that every day you can find just one moment to engage outside yourself with someone or something that helps.

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