Those who know me long/well enough will know that I generally do not like being in the sun and I try to stay as fair as possible. But once in a while, I will get struck by the very random and sudden urge to bake myself in the sun. Today was one of those days. I was out in the sun for 3hours and I actually liked it. It was blazing hot, but it was a good feeling. I managed to swim a fair bit, read my book, dozed off a little here and there … all in all it was a good and laid back afternoon by myself at the pool.
Swimming is quite therapeutic I think. Being surrounded by large quantities of water, repeating the same stroke over and over again, and blocking out most of the surrounding noises helped clear my mind. I still think of stuff when I swim, but I only think about one thing at a time, as opposed to how I normally try to run 10000 things through my mind at one go. I thought about a lot of different things today throughout the time I was at the pool, I don’t know if I have managed to ’sort out’ the various questions I had in my head, but at the very least, I think I have somehow rationalized most issues such that I now adopt a ‘things are just like that’ attitude towards certain situations, and I am emotionally detached from them now.
My knees are acting up again. They didn’t feel very good yesterday afternoon so I cut short my gym session and decided to take a break from spinning today. Which explains the swimming actually. I was very bummed about not being able to head to the gym this afternoon, but now I am actually very glad that I went to the pool instead.
I guess there can be something positive in every bad situation.
I am suffering from major Monday Blues right now because I forsee a very stressful and sucky week at work coming up. I honestly do not mind having loads to do, but I just detest what I call ‘ irritating stress’. I put pressure on myself to do well at what I do, I feel pressure on me when deadlines draw nearer, I also feel the stress when I sense that clients are not very pleased … all of these, I can deal. I accept them to be part and parcel of work, and I think they sometimes are very powerful motivating factors. In a strange way, I can appreciate those kind of stress. The stress which I truly hate is the ‘irritating stress’. Stress that derives from people irritating me, from doing things which are totally unneccessary but time consuming, from unfairness, from uncalled for remarks, from ‘games’ people play etc. This kind of stress is not only counter productive, but also puts me in a foul mood. I will feel irritation at whoever/whatever causing that stress, I will also be terribly annoyed at myself for allowing the stress to get to me, and then I get even more irritated because that kind of stress is well … irritating. And after going through a few cycles of irritated-stressed-irritated-stressed-etc (and tons of silent cursing & swearing), I will very abruptly tell myself ‘fuck it. like seriously, WHATEVER!’.
I don’t enjoy thinking that, nor feeling that, because it feels a little immature, and it makes me feel unprofessional and like I couldn’t care less about my work. Having said that, I also believe that there comes a point where people must know how to think ‘whatever’ otherwise they will go mad, slowly but surely. Especially for work related matters. At the end of the day, work is just work. And for someone like me who is not fiercely ambitious, work is really just work.
I am really NOT looking forward to the start of a new work week. Everything just feels … negative right now. I just have this really bad feeling that it is going to be one hell of a week ahead.
Wish me luck!
