R: Relax (WR)

Chill out! Just Relax

What is it that you do to relax? What to do and when to do it are important choices that you have to make in order to have a stress free life. For me it depended on how old I was, what I was doing at the time, and what stresses may or may not have been building up.

Writing has always been a way for me to relax. When I got frustrated about something or someone, I would just sit down and write about it. Here is an excerpt from a blog about some of the writing I did:

As I got older and out of high school, my writing took a different turn. Instead of taking existing stories and putting myself in them. I used my creative writing talents to take existing conditions and created “What if scenarios”. It was great therapy. One story I wrote was about what would happen if my father became president. I managed to pick on every one of my father’s bad habits. It was never shared publicly and had an interesting reaction when my family read it. The only person who liked it was my father.

If you want to read the whole blog entry go to: http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=37. As I got older my school journals helped a little.

When I had been teaching for about 15 years I developed a condition that was diagnosed as IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). There was nothing that anyone could identify that was causing it. The pains that I had in my intestines were quite intense. I know that men cannot experience the pain of childbirth, but if anything could come close, IBS would be it. These shooting pains could show up at any time. I was told to relax and that stress might be the cause, but since externally I couldn’t think about what might be stressing me, there was no solution. Then computers came into the classroom. After one  year of teaching in a computer infused classroom (my district was piloting a program where my fifth class had one computer for every two students) my district decided to relieve me of my classroom duties and made me a district-wide computer support teacher. I still got to work with students, but also got to train teachers. What was incredible to me was being to see how other teachers taught and what their classes were like. Having been in my own classroom for 15 years, I rarely got to see that. What I saw now was that all of the things that I had been doing as a teacher had been good. I wasn’t that bad of a teacher. Not only that, all of these classes I saw had the same issues my classes had had. I had fun working with computers and people. Whatever it was, my IBS went away and has not returned. That was 28 years ago. I definitely was more relaxed.

Now I continue to write. As a retired teacher I do get to pick and chose when I go into a class to teach. I still teach kids and teachers about computers and technology. And I tell stories. The stress level is much lower in my professional life. At home when on my own I get to read, work on my computer and iDevices and binge watch all those science fiction and mystery programs I like. It is relaxing.

Whatever you have to do to relax, just do it. It can’t hurt.