This thing turned into a bit of a ramble, so just cope…
So, a friend of mine, and a good friend of a lot of people I know, passed away on Monday. Apparently he fell in a climbing accident, though there is still some amount of investigation going on concerning it. Anyway, that is not what this post is about.
This is about my feelings and approach to his death, and my observations of how others are dealing with it. Yes, I understand it is a sad event to have happen, and that he will be missed. I get it. But I just don’t seem to have the same sense of loss that everyone else is having. Am I just more cold-hearted than other people, or did I just not know him as well, or what?
Perhaps it has something to do with my approach to life in the first place. I feel that you should look towards the good things in life, and the good things about any situation, and try to pay as little homage to the bad things as you can. As such, I look at his death and I think, “Well, at least he passed away doing something that he truly loved doing.” Yeah, little comfort for his family and all, but that is how I look at things. This is the same way I am with my father passing away… he passed away getting the sailboat ready for a little afternoon sail, something he loved doing.
I think that this approach to life in general is what I feel is making me so susceptible to high stress levels. I normally lead a very low-stress lifestyle simply due to the approach I take on things. It isn’t that I have a bunch of low-stress things that I do, because I can see how a lot of the things that I do would be considered quite high stress, but my way of dealing with things in general simply reduces those stress inducers to levels that make life quite easy for me. So, when I am placed in a situation like I am feeling right now where there seems to be a lot of stress on me right now and I am seeing physical effects (I developed a god-damned EYE TWITCH!) I just don’t know how to cope with it because I am not experienced in it in the first place. Other people can probably go through the stress that I am going through and barely feel it, simply because they are accustomed to dealing with it in the first place because it has happened so often to them. I don’t allow my stress levels to reach this point in the first place, so I am not experienced in it and quite frankly don’t know how to react.
