Dont stoke up the furnace!

The Practice of Being Happy. #14 Now that Christmas is yesterday, bathe in the sense of today. The rain came and washed away the “white Christmas” of our dreams and all the shouts of children playing in the snow are but echoes now, fading like last nights dream as the force of today overpowers it. So here we are today, still part of the Christmas weekend to be sure, but something has past. What’s gone? The expectation? The anticipation? And the stress associated with this, the fears the one won’t measure up or make it in time? That things won’t be PERFECT!

This mind party is very obvious at Christmas because the whole culture get heated up, stoked up like the old coal furnace in the house, so that our emotions get exaggerated from the heat. Now that the furnace has returned to normal, we can notice how silly all our worry was, how needless the stress was…everything turned out great no matter what we did or didn’t do. It was Christmas!

Now that you have noticed how silly worry is, how dysfunctional stress is not only to the mind but the body too, use Christmas as a marker, a reference to the same tendencies to worry and stress as  the coming day, even today if you can. Notice when you are throwing more coal than is needed into your emotional furnace. One should keep a steady heat, a consistent flame. This way one avoids boiling over and then cooling down into a depression. You don’t save energy by messing with the thermostat!