[View from my hotel room at the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco earlier this month.]

I’ll just say this right off the bat and get it over with:  I feel like I have been…let’s see, how shall I put this gently…oh yes, right, here we go – INSANE – over the past few days.  Depending on what time of day it was any blog entry I made could have been anything from a never-ending rant on greed and materialism to a sobby, woeful, sad sack of frustrations to a jubilant, glowing treatise on all things happy and rainbow-y in life.  My mood at times has been shifting by the hour, where one minute I feel like a rock star and the next minute I’m on the verge of tears, all the while wondering what kind of emotional or hormonal imbalance could possibly be going on to make me feel like such a crazy woman.  And let’s just be clear – I haven’t been simply feeling like a crazy woman, but acting like a crazy woman.

I could sit here and write about all the bits and pieces of the story that led me to the realization I had today, but instead I’ll just get right to the point.  I think what has been going on is that my body is worn out.  I have been in a cycle for many weeks of having some kind of great workout followed by at least two days of intense soreness.  While I am not an Olympian athlete, I am in good shape, and I have started to feel downright depressed over the fact that I haven’t been able to get out of this painful cycle.  Maybe I am naive in the ways of body mechanics, but I don’t think I should be feeling this intensely sore all the time.  Something has started to feel really off.

Our Wisconsin vacation was so peaceful, quiet and gentle, and after it ended I was eager to make a commitment to bringing more of that gentleness in my life.  Yet here I am, a mere three weeks later, feeling like I am back in the fray of craziness, anxiety and all-around worn-out-ness.  I came back home with a deep peaceful energy in my heart and was immediately flung back in the direction of “too much”, “not enough” and “keep working”.  Bit by bit, my internal vibrations got cranked up like the dial on an amplifier with no music playing, where the buzzing that was barely audible on level one is a distinct, high-pitched hum on levels eight, nine and ten.

I was talked into taking a yoga class this morning, and in the middle of class an earthquake hit.  It wasn’t huge or scary, but still a tad jarring, with everyone in the class looking around at one another through nervous, relieved giggles after it was over.  I’m not going to sit here and say I had some grand epiphany in that moment, but I will say it was a tiny reminder that I need to make a more concerted effort to back away from this feeling that I am never doing enough.  Walking through life this tightly wound is only going to lead to destruction in some form or another, and I think my body is trying to tell me I need to do whatever I have to do to get that volume knob turned back down.

For me, this is a tall order…here I am later in the day after this tiny glimpse of wisdom and already feeling frantic again, as if my to do list grew exponentially while I was away from my desk (which in fact, it did not).  But I am trying.  Trying to take a deep breath, trying to avoid looking at the clock and feeling like I am in a race against time, trying to remove all the gremlins from my consciousness.  I am trying.  All of the things that have been keeping me so intensely on the go since we returned from Wisconsin have been positive, great things, and I see now that the more I insist on trying to maintain this level of movement, the more fun I’ll drain from each moment.  Simply put:  I can’t do it all or have it all.  At least not in one day.

I am SO thankful of all of the wonderful, supportive comments everyone left about the printing of my book.  It is at the bindery right now and I will begin pre-orders for the softcover editions later this week, then the first round of shipments will go out on August 20th, a few weeks ahead of schedule.  More details on that, as well as information on new prints, book events and other goodies, will be posted here as well this week.  Until then, I will be doing my best to slow myself down, at least a little bit.