Today is National Stress Awareness Day. I don’t feel under a lot of stress, but that could be attributed to getting older and not caring about many things I used to fret over. Or, it could be that I’ve gotten fairly adept at pushing stressors to the back of my mind, telling them to go away because, really, we have it pretty good here. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to stress about, yet I feel a need to save my energy for more important things—or impending things we’re unaware of. I used to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, if I could sleep at all. I couldn’t ever put my finger on it, but I kept having this impending feeling of doom. Sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t the dawn of covid. Thankfully, those sleepless nights are more or less gone. It seems I’ve always had a touch of anxiety, which has manifested itself in many ways over the decades—and probably could explain my control freak nature. One thing I’m trying not to stress about is the election results in VA (buh-bye, 21^st century; hello, 1950s). I try to understand other viewpoints, but I wrestle with the blatant hypocrisy. In order to keep stress at bay, I have to accept what is, but I had thought we learned our lesson from recent political events.

I’ll take my comfort in the arrival soup-making season, and puzzle season…although puzzle season started in April 2020 and never quite went away. After an incredibly difficult one that took me several weeks (blurry image of an old-time map of Bristol, England’s, streets in small pieces), I’m taking on a 500-piece gift from one of Hubby’s brothers and which Hubby doesn’t want to do (puzzle snob). Anyway, it’s time to hunker down, to draw in, to slow things for winter and gather strength for 2022. Tempus fugit.