I have a confession to make. It is one of my great comforts and it is slightly embarrassing.
As I am a person prone to stress, I have pieced together a system that seems to work (for the most part) when I am under the gun. It is a multi-step process that almost always pacifies my stress. Here goes:
1) Pray 
2) Find humour in absolutely anything (this is the part where sometimes I succeed in being very funny and sometimes people just look at me strangely as I laugh maniacally. Disturbing (or hilarious), I know.
3) Run, Write or Read. Basically, I need to immerge myself in any activity that begins with an “r” sound.
4) Drink.
a) I love espresso and making an excellent cup of espresso is a wonderful way to de-escalate my stress level (this is a con panna – order one sometime, they’re delightful! If you do it at Starbucks you’ll really confuse the baristas. Fun pastime of mine.)
b) THIS POINT IS CRUCIAL TO THE WHOLE PROCESS: I absolutely must mix some half-and-half (or breve, if you will) in with my coffee drink and check the expiration date.
Allow me to expand on point b of number 4 a bit. I check the breve’s expiration date not because I am concerned that it is expired, but because I have come to measure my whole life by the expiration date of half-and-half. Big meeting coming up that I feel overwhlemed about? Check the date! I will invariably find that the half-and-half expires two weeks after my meeting. For reasons that are ineffable even to me, this timeline somehow makes me feel better.
Prime example: I have some half-and-half in my fridge right now. Expiration date? January 13, 2013. I have 6 big meetings in December. Yet every time I look at that expiration date, I find myself thinking, “Those meetings will be over before you know it. For goodness sake, you’ll still be using this breve when all the meetings are finished!”
It’s completely non-sensical, but in that moment, my mind breathes a sigh of relief and I gain new strength to press on.
Weird, right?
