A real test
The cyclical theory of life was pretty much spot on. If you stopped and really observed what was going on around you, you would know that it was real. I decided to give it a try and kept this thought with me as I struggled through my workday.
The pressures at work had not tapered off. I decided to try my friend’s technique, and to my amazement, it actually worked. I simply kept thinking that one day I would be looking back at this and laughing – one day I would be riding the cycle back up and away from this nonsense.
Any disaster that arose, in which I felt as though my world would collapse, was manageable because I knew that things would not stay that way forever.
At one point, I made a mistake that resulted in everyone having to work late to correct the error. Customers were screaming at me, my boss was yelling at everyone, and my co-workers seemed to hate being in the same room with me.
Without the hope that the cycle would come to an end soon, I would have been a nervous wreck. I would have been sick with worry, anxiety, stress, and depression. I would have blamed myself for everything.
Instead, I clung to the knowledge that this was a temporary thing – that I was simply on the negative end of a cycle, and that I would eventually resume a normal existence once more.
The knowledge allowed me to remain calm and I actually become more useful in this state. It wasn’t so much a feeling of not caring, it was more like a bit of inside information that I possessed, and no one else did.
The others seemed shocked that I was not totally incapacitated with stress and anxiety – after all, this crisis had been entirely due to my screw-up. They seemed surprised at the newly found calmness that replaced the old nervous skittishness that had sadly become what people expected from me.
Could you call it confidence? No, it was more like a calm faith that things would be ok.
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