Just. Relax.

So very much easier said than done. Yet I never cease to marvel at how well it works when I can manage it. Everything is just okay if I can relax through it. Late to school? What's going to happen? Terrible headache? Complaining about it won't make it better. All the kids crying, at the same time? Well, they'll stop eventually. (I am not even pretending to talk about the really horrible stuff, just about everyday annoyances).
But when I am not successful at talking that approach, everything is stressful. And I can't imagine being able to relax through something as impossible as whatever it is I'm going through.
So I'm waiting to find what it is that will let me just chill through more stressful situations. I've gotten as far as realizing that relaxing doesn't make it pleasant, but it does make it more manageable and productive. And that the absolute worst thing to so in a stressful situation is panic, think negatively, blame and criticize. I first learned it getting ready for Shabbos, hating the panicked stress and miserable hungry children wailing as I lit Shabbos candles. This is not what it's supposed to be like. And I'm still trying, still trying.
People often say to me "You're always so calm! How do you do it?" and it's really not true, I am not always calm. I may be calm often (at least by current cultural standards where it's normal to curse at strangers whose driving habits you don't like), but certainly not always. I hope to be some day, if for no other reason than it's so much more pleasant to exist when I am calm. (Even the sound of the word is calm. Warm and quiet.:) In this way, being calm is like a mitzvah which is its own reward, one way of reading the saying "schar mitzvah, mitzvah," the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah. I think of that often.