Deep Breathing

It's funny how you don't appreciate things until you can't have them anymore. For me this has been taking deep breathes and sleeping through the night without waking up coughing violently. We tell ourselves in times of stress and turbulence to center and take deep breaths, but what if you can't? Instead you take a shallow breath and panic. Another and another and another until you're hyperventilating. If only you can calm yourself down. Slow down the breathing. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

I find my life is in a constant mode of almost hyperventilating. I keep feeling like I'm being put on other people's timetable and scurrying around trying to catch up or slow down. We've been talking for the past few weeks in my Life and Work of the Pastor class about how being an effective pastor basically means that you have to figure out your own time table first. If you don't, you allow others to set that. How true is that of life in general?

I feel this tug in so many directions- people waiting expectantly for that next big leap be it a job, a move, marriage, insurance, a vocation and every time someone else hits that its a stark reminder that I'm still lost in someone's time table for me. And I find myself resentful. I'm sympathetic, but it's not like I haven't felt the same worry and anxiety. I see friends getting careers and getting engaged and moving into the quintessential adulthood and wondering why my bus hasn't bored yet. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I should be reasonably happy for where I'm at but I've spent so much time letting those timetables envelope me that I can't see when I'm supposed to board.

So it's always catch-up to nothing. And I'm always two breaths away from hyperventilating. Deep breath. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.