It seems that stress just comes with the territory for all of us who live and work in the 21st century. Although I review the steady stream of new books released each year on handling stress, it doesn’t seem as though anyone has any magic answers for keeping our work and personal lives in balance while taking care of ourselves.
In fact, trying to keep that balance seems to have become one more thing on our “to-do” list. I struggle with this as much as anyone else. Even going on vacation is rated as a stressful event on questionnaires that measure stress. I was reminded recently of just how stressful going on vacation can be when I was trying to clear my schedule and finish off a lot of loose ends to get away for a much-needed and well-deserved extended weekend trip to beautiful northern Ontario.
I had planned my weekend getaway around major project deadlines. In the week leading up to it, I managed to clear off the most pressing details of my workload. But as the weekend got closer, the planets seemed to be aligning to keep me ensnared in work. I have seldom seen a week where I had so many new projects, emergencies and unexpected problems come up that needed my attention and threatened to spill over into my weekend.
As fast as I cleared one message from my voice mail or e-mail, two more messages appeared in its place, as though they were multiplying like rabbits. One person even wanted to know where I could be reached while I was away! I responded that if I told him that, I’d have to kill him. He was not amused.
That same day, I expressed to a sympathetic friend my frustration over all these last-minute demands and said to her, “What does everybody want, my blood?” I finally managed to get the most urgent things handled, get the car packed and was doing a last-minute check of the house to ensure I hadn’t forgotten anything important before leaving for my trip, when the phone rang.
I wasn’t going to answer it but thought it might be important so I picked it up. It was the Red Cross: They wanted my blood.
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Tags: deadlines, stress, vacation
