Coping with slowing down

Life has slowed down. That's both very welcome and not fun at the same time. 

Bad things first 
I've always been somewhat hyperactive. These days it comes out more as mental activity than actual jumping around (my boys claim to have hardly ever seen me run). Hence I find it hard to slow down. 

I find moving quickly from a place of high pressure a hard thing (unless I'm on holidays). I remember learning in some rural health promotion work I did when I was an Occupational Therapist "in the country" in my early 20s that you can't just lift a heavy object (like a tractor) off someone who has been crushed. It needs to be carefully controlled or they'll potentially die very quickly. Well I'm not in that kind of physical danger here, but having the mental and physical strain lifted fairly quickly here does mean I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. I'm trying not to fill the void with more activity, but it's hard.

These three students were fun to teach cross stitching with

Good things next
Amazingly I'm finding myself able to delve into things that were previously not urgent!

On Saturday I had a creative day. I taught cross stitch to some students in the morning at CAJ and baked in the afternoon, that was very good for me.

It's also given me thinking and research time.

Currently I'm thinking about:

1. virtual teams
2. team bonding
3. leadership
4. friends



Sticky chocolate date pudding with butterscotch sauce. I baked
this on Saturday afternoon while the guys were all "board
gaming" at someone else's house. This is absolutely more-ish.

5. other publishing projects

The first three of these are related to the training I did in Thailand. As I wrote at the time, we were given the task of creating and completing three assignments in the next six months related to what we touched on during that week. I've never had such an open plan for assignments, I've rarely gone to a workshop that had such a thing built into it (with accountability, the PreHome Assignment workshop we came away from with plenty to do, but not much accountability).

But I have to admit my thoughts are a bit muddled. These aren't nice concrete tasks that I can just tick off the list. I find that hard.

The fourth thing on the list is something I'd like to write about as a challenge from The Grove. But I'm feeling the pressure of time (they give a weekly topic and you have five days to produce something...). I'm reading a book about friends as well, and I'd like to write about it here. But the thoughts need more time to percolate.

The fifth on the list is somewhat a source of angst as I'm mostly waiting on other people to reply to me. But I have had a chance to think about on this and will hopefully be in a better place when people eventually get back to me.

How about you? How do you cope when the pressure is suddenly or unexpectedly lifted?