River System

Pic by Neil's Photography under a CC licence

Sometimes the days are good, and you want to stay there because they are good and you feel like yourself in them (even if nothing amazing is happening) and there is a river and you're flowing in it, and it's good.  Even if not-good things are happening in it.

Call it parasympathetic nervous system.

And then there are the other days.  At those times you have to lie in bed breathing before you can get out and face the day that feels doomed, and you keep rounding the corner and falling over your very own self-hatred.  Because being you is hard for certain functional reasons where your body does not behave the way you would really like it to so as to have an enjoyable life.  You are feeling anxious.  And then you start feeling anxious about feeling anxious.  A delightful, satanic swirl of round and roundness.

Call it sympathetic nervous system.

On top of that, in trying to describe this sort of stuff you're thinking, who gives a fuck about your self-indulgent griping?  Nevertheless, that thought doesn't make the situation any easier.  It just makes it as hard as it was before and like you're being judged at the same time.  Even though you're not being judged by anybody but the nasty ones in the chorus of The Cast of Thousands (and I guess anyone who is reading this who is thinking, harden the fuck up, but if you are - I'm sure there's a few other pages on the interwebs written by people who are very strong  and who are not pussies like me).


In these days, going along with the flow is hard, even though you train yourself in the good days for days like this.

So much of life is about staying in the flow.  You used to think that the problem with swimming in the river on these sorts of days was getting your foot caught in the unseen crap on the bottom of the river.  But now you think that maybe even worse than the initial problem of getting your foot caught is the expectation you have that the riverbed should be tangle-free.   And the expectation that your life should be hassle-free, or that your body should be limitation-free.

It's the expectation that is the real causes the stress.  Wisebrain says so.