The nut is tightened, another rotation of the spanner, another day has passed.
Recently a client asked me, how do you know how stressed you are?
Each day, with each rotation, the nut tightens a little more. In my mind an image of a ratchet spanner, working slowly back and forth with the light clicking sound it makes in one direction. Then, the unknown, but predictable event happens – the metal nut begins to splinter the wood. Overtightened, with nowhere else to go, the nut begins to bore into the very material it was designed to support.
Over familiarity with the day-to-day tightening up of the nut, the ratcheting up of the stress in life, can leave us devoid of way markers. After several months or several years, disorientated from what a relaxed feeling once felt like, we don’t really know how stressed we are. We might be able to say more or less than yesterday, last month or last year, but it is common that we don’t really know any more, many new highs have been achieved and surpassed.
‘It looks like the leaning tower of Pisa, the bottom part going one way, then the other direction in the middle, before returning again at the top… I have never seen that before’ commented my chiropractor on my first visit. Momentarily crippled by my legs giving way the day before, I was totally unaware of the startling architecture that my spine had become.
Day by day, week by week, year by year my work had been ever more stressful. A smile and ‘yeah, I’m fine, how are you?’ was the easiest response to give, too much other stuff to get on with. Masked by busyness, knowing that it would sort itself out at some point as it always had done in the past, I pushed on, until the day my body said, ‘no more’. If you won’t stop this, I will.
I now listen everyday to what my body is telling me, even if my mind sometimes cannot.
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