stress

The Tyranny of Time.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

time-zone-watchIn the mornings, I often sit with some coffee and survey the traffic on the nearby highway, watching people trying to get to wherever they are going for whatever reasons. They are, of course, in a hurry.

They are, of course, not going anywhere fast in traffic.

It’s cyclic. The government has paid people to pay people to build an overpass not far away, spending 500 million Trinidad and Tobago dollars as far as the public knows. Nobody claims to actually want it other than the government. It’s supposed to alleviate traffic, I suppose, yet when it rains, the nearby highway floods and causes traffic anyway. And it will cause traffic with the overpass that they are building too.

Yesterday, I found myself in traffic coming back from the grocery store. I got stuck for 45 minutes in what normally only takes me 7 minutes or so to get home, so I stopped for lunch, surveyed the traffic, and spent another 20 minutes getting home, surrounded by people standing still yet… in a rush.

The clock won’t stop. A pulse of a heart that doesn’t belong to you can drive yours into overdrive pushes nutrients past you as fast as they move toward you, away from you as fast as they get to you, and there is no pause.

Yet you can take one.

The Rush

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Blowing In The Wind.We are sensate creatures, we humans.

Whether on a motorcycle, at the beach or even in the water, we feel the motion of our hair. It can be reassuring, calming, when we are in control. Maybe we kick off from the side or bottom of the pool and feel the rush of it, maybe we accelerate maniacally on a motorcycle or with the windows down on a car… long gone are the days when children got to feel it along their scalps as they pedaled their bicycles, but some of us remember.

And then there are times when we are standing still, when the wind moves around us, our hair moves and we get a similar sensation. It might be a calm breeze, it might be the storm whipping through our hair. It might be a fan…

And then there are times when we feel in motion, we are in motion, and we’re uncertain whether what we feel is because of what we’re doing or because of the world around us. Are we falling? Are we pushing forward? Is the motion we feel our acceleration, or the world accelerating against us?

impeller corrosionWe are sensate beings, the relativity of that sometimes confusing us. The world moves even when we don’t, the world acts even when we don’t. Sometimes we scream that it’s our inaction blowing our hair, sometimes we scream it’s our action blowing our hair, but there are times when it’s truly indeterminate. In a rush, like a submarine cavitating it’s propeller, with bubbles forming against it’s hull, we are blind to what’s around us.

The faster we move, the less we know about what is around us, insensate to the world around us because of our own noise.

When we push forward fast, we don’t know. And that can be a scary thing. It can be seen as a fear of success, or it can be a valid fear of failure. It can be anything.

So we slow. We stop. We listen. We feel.

Those of us that are sane, anyway.

The Lost Art of Waiting

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

The WaitingIn the rush of things, people hate waiting – they task themselves with so many things to do within a period of time so that they can do other things. Pathways to the future light up like dendrites as we achieve small ‘victories’ in getting things done.

We are awash in these little victories so often, yet feel like we’re sliding backwards at time – we become stressed and frustrated. Our frail bodies react, increasing blood pressure even as we’re forced to sit still and wait, a primal instinct from the Serengeti1.

There is an art to waiting. Because one is waiting to do something does not mean that you cannot do other things. On my return to Trinidad and Tobago, I find more waiting than I had grown accustomed to in the United States, where the smiles flaccid keep the customers placid.

The art is to not waste time. Yesterday, at a place I get my pickup worked on, I was told by the owner that I should not stay, that I make the mechanics nervous, that I should drop it off and come back for it. I laughed at him, something he’s not used to. I don’t mind waiting on my vehicle; I depend on my vehicle and am used to doing things myself or watching them be done so that when I take my vehicle into the diminishing areas around civilization that I am not without understanding of what has been done, and what can happen.

The Brake PadA perfect example were the brake pads that needed to be replaced as the mechanic went through my front end.  Had I not been there, had this been done in my absence, there would be a doubt about whether I was being scammed. Sure, it is good to trust people, but it is more important to be able to trust your tools. My vehicle is a tool with a purpose that requires the functionality I demand. And for that, I wait.

But it’s more than that. When waiting, one encounters others who are also waiting. This morning as I had something else checked out on the vehicle elsewhere, I spoke with a few rally drivers about their upcoming rally, and how they were setting the camber of their wheels, as well as whether they were going for toe in or toe out. I ran into the groundsmen from my alma mater next door and got a free bottle of water for the encounter.

And I got to see how someone I had been referred to was trying to show how an employee didn’t do his job to those around him using my vehicle as an example, whereas I had to stand there and correct him that the employee had done what was right and only partially diagnosed some issues – as he should2. After all, staged diagnoses are how one gets things done a lot of the time. There are no silver bullets, just were-elephants that we eat piece by piece.

I watch people fidgeting with their phones, texting away or messaging with people that they know, ignoring what is happening right in front of them. I saw the floor supervisor have to slap the hood of a company’s vehicle – the driver, as he fidgeted on his phone, completely unaware of his surroundings3.

There is an art to waiting, a way of not wasting the time but investing the time being spent while waiting for some small victory. It varies, but it’s there.

It’s a matter of what you invest the time in.

1Those that disagree and wish to say that we appeared because of a superior being are asked to check their blood pressure at this time and explain why the fight or flight response has been activated in their bodies, and give a reasonable explanation. Leave it in the comments. I promise to give any explanation the attention I believe it deserves. Honest.

2Staged diagnoses are something that confuse people, particularly in management. I’ve seen it in every discipline, from mechanical to electrical to software, and even to medicine. It’s the scientific method practically applied. More on this in another post. 

3 Being in the present means something else for some people. Connecting with others elsewhere means disconnecting from those directly around. Situational awareness. Fodder for yet another post.