Life is full of stress and some days, it doesn’t seem like you can get away from stress. Even in taking a walk or trying to relax, stress just seems to pop up.

Before leaving the house this morning, Baby B was walking down the steps and after he told me that he loved me, he said “good luck dad”. Man, that kid had no idea how true those words were today, because today has been one of those days. If it could have gone wrong, it has and things just haven’t seemed right. Meetings, more work, last minute requests, a to do list that is 10 projects deep and the last minute request to provide data that I should really take 4 days to gather and analyze, but have 12 hours.

STRESS!

Throughout the day, I have had several co-workers to stop by to say hello or just to see how I was doing. But today, I just haven’t wanted to really to be social because of all of the work. But as I have gone through the day, I have realized two important things about stress:

1) Stress is a pain in the butt, but it is a fact of life. But it is how we deal with stress that makes it easier to handle.
2) As bad and stressful as my day has been, there are people that are facing much worse things than I am right now.

Just at that moment, when I stopped looking at the stress and looking at the other factors, I closed my eyes for just a moment, put my ear phones in and put on a little bluegrass music. Stress will always be present in our lives, but it is how we choose to deal with it that determines if we over come the stress or we succumb to it.