From Pressure to Relief

 With my workload decreasing by next week, I hope to be able to release pressure from within myself. But I sometimes need a lot of reminders that "Pressure" never really comes from "outside" a person at all. It is more about harboring certain mental attitudes that keep a person tense and on edge.
   To give a simple example, at work,I am often driven by fears of having low stats, or not having any way to quantify what I do on a day to day basis. This is part of the whole karma of work life: the more I accumulate "good works" or what I can quantify as good, the more I can confirm that I am on the right path. This approach ignores the way that work is spontaneous and changes from day to day, but it somehow promises that work can be "quantified" in some way.
   But in fact, life is complicated because not everything can be quantified--including one's very own self and soul---and one can sometimes get into the habit of thinking that they are only really that "one thing" and nothing more. In fact, we are much more than what we think, and this is the beauty of being able to let go of one quantifiable thing that keeps us worried.