Stress

Today I'm thinking about stress. Right this minute, I'm waiting to see if an offer we made on a house yesterday is going to be accepted. Tomorrow I will be stressed while an inspector goes through my current home, checking to see if it is acceptable...  The life of a writer is filled with stress. Waiting to see if the behind the scenes people like your work, crit groups, agents, editors. Then waiting to see how the public feels about it. I try to take the long view. Things will work out for the best. Even my long period of struggling to find the write thing to write, my period of rejection and woe, ended with better results than I could have imagined.

Teens have a lot of stress, too. Decisions they make can define, not the rest of their lives...but they can have enough impact that it seems so. Choosing a college. Picking the right classes and making good enough grades to get into that college...who you are friends with, where you go, what you do when you get there...things that seem of little consequence in retrospect can be huge when you are in high school.

Maybe that's why sometimes like books with huge stakes. We like to forget the smaller stresses, will I get the loan? will I get the grade? does he like me or not? Is someone taking about me? what are they saying? I would love to be a totally calm human being. A person who could gamble or make important decisions without being reduced to a quivering pile of self-questioning jelly. Even now, I question that metaphor. The self-questioning is bad enough, as a modifier for the jelly, but why would jelly ever be in a pile?