How to Be Okay With the Worst

I am in one of the tougher parts of my adult life right now. The economy isn’t great and in order to give my daughter a great foundation and start saving for another kid, I am working around the clock for now.

So I am writing this how-to for me and if it’s useful for you, cool.

First: Take it day by day. Cliché and good advice. Just because today was incredibly intense doesn’t mean I need to start predicting that tomorrow or the rest of the week is going to be the same. I am doing the work to remember I can be surprised (in a good way) about what the future holds. I hold hope each morning that something will happen that I couldn’t have predicted that helped give me some ease.

Second: Take a moment every hour or so (at least) to tune into my body sensations. Pent up tension, hunched shoulders, shallow breathing, scrunched up face. When I’m working hard and/or resisting something I don’t like, that’s what my body does and if left to do that for hours on end, it feel exponentially worse. When I take a second to check in, I then also have the opportunity to just take a big breath, get up and walk around for a second or do a stretch, or grab some food.

Third: Prepare by saying “no.” The discipline of saying no to things that I either think I have time for or think I am obligated to do right away has been quite the practice. My to-do list just gets longer every day. It takes courage to set a deadline with my boss that fits in with my ability to also drive home, see Isabel, shower, eat, cook, be. That deadline isn’t luxuriously far out, but it also isn’t “right now.” I also have to say no to watching that extra episode of TV or going out with a friend. Not every single time. But yeah, most of the time.

Fourth: Remember to pay attention to what is right in front of me. In the moments where I could pause to soak in some joy or something proud, my advice to myself is to just do that. Tell my mind “We’ll come back to that later” when trying to plan the next day mentally, and simply see the cuteness of my daughter or the dope lighting of my living room with the feeling of a cold beer in my hand or the silly antics of my wife when she’s telling me a story.

Every day is both the best and the worst, relatively. The bad stuff is water off a ducks back (and sometimes, tears out of the ducks eyes across it’s bill) and the good stuff is the feeling of a good, loud quack. This metaphor is pretty bad, but you know what: QUACK.