Watch and Wait. In contrast, take some initiative! Don’t stay stuck in a frustrating situation!
Caffiene late at night gets you over the hump of unproductivity when you sit down, exhausted and try to accomplish something. Its also perfect for a restless night and another day of sleep-deprivation-induced insanity.
Find something you are good at! Stay with something until you are good at it!
Ask as many people as you can about what you should do at this critical juncture of your life, even as you avoid the act of creating space for the divine—the only source of influence that ultimately matters .
Stop eating carbs, it’s only going to make you more stressed. Stop trying to stop eating carbs; your life is too stressful to eliminate one of your primary sources of comfort, and you are creating more stress by trying.
Continue complaining at work—it helps to get it out—as long as you can develop a taste for smug annoyance from everyone you complain to—after all, ‘teaching is not for the faint at heart,’ they tell you.
Chocolate helps. Helps you start overindulging in everything.
Jimmy? You did the right thing telling him you didn’t want to talk to him anymore. But if you were talking….
It’s not like you live in Aushwitz, or you are starving in Ethiopa; suck it up! Then again, martyrs and stoics are seem a little crazy.
You can find a school that allows you to feel more successful. However you will get paid less, have worse bosses, and will have another first year.
Luke? Well, it’s good you didn’t go to his wedding. But maybe you missed out.
It’s good to have a home. Stability is good for your soul. But if you stay somewhere too long , you will turn into an imaginationless old spinster who missed the purpose of her life.
If you continue to be overweight, you will not be attractive. Or, you will not be attractive until you decide you are not overweight. Or until you lose the weight you won’t be interested in trying with men. Or until you lose the weight you will be too insecure to accept a man’s advances. Or maybe neither attractive or unattractive or overweight or not overweight really matters.
It’s really great that you are so happy single! Of course, you are only happy because you don’t know what you are missing!
You don’t have to make a decision right away. Unless it’s possible to miss your life just like you miss the bus.
You should be grateful you have a job! But if your job makes you want to light yourself on fire, than get a new one!
God is there, behind the scenes, slowly clearing a path through the wasteland for you. Then again, since you haven’t asked, don’t ever pray, can’t stand fasting, and swear at Him a lot, he probably left.
You are dying inside…take care of yourself before it’s too late! Then you will live the rest of your life having never really found your limits and experienced surrender and an understanding of the basic anxiety that all of us face when stripped of our ability to do it on our own…the kind of “dark night of the soul” that finally leads to unity with the Divine.
If you go to another school next year you will have to start over. Conversly, if you stay at the school, they are making so many changes you will be starting over if you stay too!
You should be a writer! Even though you have no real experience, no clue how to enter that world, and you already know others who are far more experienced who are failing at writing full-time!
Quit your job and start grant writing! But what about the poor, the hungry, the unpopular, the grieving!
Your sister is mentally ill—you should go easy on her. Yet if you don’t tell her where your limits are, you will help to create an even bigger monster!
When you go home and see your parents, it’s good to relax, enjoy their hospitality, and let go of your rules. Can you do that without eating 5 lbs of candy a day at their house?
If you get married, you should marry for love. But don’t marry a guy who isn’t rich enough to pay for kids…do you want two jobs?
Tomorrow after spending 14 hours solid with kids, you should do your writing assignment, pack quickly so you can spend the night at your friends house so you can spend the last precious moments you can with a dying woman, read 30 pages in your school counseling textbook, cook the salmon that is sitting in your fridge, finish your counseling philosophy paper, put away your laundry, finish up a few grants, study your “lines”, and call your sister.
You should stop eating bagels and kid’s snacks in the faculty room at work. But why pass up free food?
You are gaining ground! You are staying at work less and less. You are getting use to it. On the other hand, it could be like that old experiment—if you throw a frog in lukewarm water, they don’t even notice the heat is slowly going up until they boil to death. Good luck keeping your sanity.
You love snowboarding! The fresh air, the tree runs! Aside from the constant reminder that you are a of a small minority of rich white people who throw away money on frivolous entertainment while the rest of the world walks three days for water and barely sustains themselves and their 10 kids on a diet of rice and fish guts.
Oh to lay aside Comparing and Judgmental Mind!
1 comment:
I'm wondering if perhaps saving a chunk of money to get a nice new wardrobe that fits YOU would help you stress less. I did this upon return from deployment (at the same weight that I was at the beginning of Weight Watchers Round 1) and cannot believe what it did for my self-confidence. I have about five or six really nice outfits - from casual to fancy, with shoes and a new purse and some new workout clothes, and they fit me at my size. It took a while to find them all (a week of shopping), the right cuts etc., and it cost some money. But, I go into the closest and get dressed and feel confident and can't believe the difference it makes in my attitude (Josh has commented on it too). I think that spending that money, while it did not go to poor people, was a good thing. (Though for some reason I feel the desire to list for you the amount given in tithes and gifts so you know I care about other people too...weird). I say this because your last line "the constant reminder that you are a small minority of rich white people who throw away money..." kind of makes me mourn for you a bit because it takes away from the joy that you can experience while participating in the blessing of snowboarding. Is this true for anything that you do that you enjoy that isn't free or dirty? No sacrifice we make will ever be enough to pay back or do enough to make us worthy of the sacrifice that God made for us. (There's this kids book out there about sort of about cats "you can't feed 1,000 cats, but you can feed the cat in front of you" that I like). Maybe we are supposed to live in a sackcloth, having given away all of our things and doing nothing fun unless it's available to everyone in the whole world. Do you think that? I hope that's not true. It makes me sad.
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