Learning to "Enjoy" Pressure

  This week is a big cut-off deadline at my work, and yet it is also a short work week due to the impending long weekend. I think about all the things that are possible for me to do, yet realize that there is simply not enough time to do everything I want to do in this short time, at least before the quarterly take off. While it's difficult to accept the latter, there is also a kind of joy or excitement that can come with pressure, if one understands it in a certain way. From one perspective, the fact that things cannot be completed in a short time suggests impermanence, or the sense that things are invariably bound to change. Knowing that the ways one engages and the factors that come into play are always shifting, perhaps that's also a time to reflect on whether it's necessary to grasp onto any arrangement as though it were going to be there forever.
    Times of pressure are often just moments of transition. An example may be that of finding a new place to live. The steps that one has to take to ease into the transformation to a new place can be daunting and even burdensome at times, but this is only because the old foundations (or tent pegs, as it were) are being relocated to a completely new space. Once the new location is established, then one starts to become more settled in rhythms of life or patterns, but these too are followed by other kinds of transitions. The 'pressure' one experiences from being uprooted is only compounded by two ideas: one is the idea of wanting to hold onto a previous arrangement that no longer can exist, and the other is believing that there can never be another rhythm established again, or that one is in 'utter chaos' after the new change. These show very extreme views: one is attachment to something that is thought to be ideal or permanent, while the other is a more nihilistic view that there is a constant state of instability everywhere, in all things.
  In reality, the way the mind works is somewhere in between these two. On the one hand, we need our memories and experiences to navigate new situations, and these previous experiences often provide the context to understand newness and work with it. Newness, in other words, is never 'absolute' newness because we are using our existing languages and experiences to make some sense of where we are with the new thing. But even languages are bound to break down in the face of change, and it requires a certain kind of faith to know that we exist in the middle, where language and 'non-language' intersect.