Choosing the stress

“You need to sort out your priorities.”

Is that what a lot of women who want the world get to hear?

“You have a home to manage two kids to take care, you don’t want to outsource teaching them or cooking and you feel bad you are not doing as well as you wanted to at work!”

“Everything is not possible.”

Knowing that doesn’t work.

Sometimes you want everything.

And that creates all the strife in your heart.

I tried to avoid the stress-that is supposed to be the biggest killer of our times. To focus on a few things and to do them well. Those things all turned out to be the most necessary and the least soul-filling of all the things.

I did them. But I was not less stressed.

Because in keeping priorities to a manageable level, all the fun, all the meaning was lost.

The body would perhaps live longer, but the soul was crushed. The scientific part of me doubts even the existence of a soul-I know it is critical to keep the body running, but the fact just doesn’t work for the other part of me, the mad, crazy part.

So again, I strive to do it all-to scrimp and save the minutes and spend them with my children; to go back to driving through the dug-out roads to Bangalore and do a job that gives me an identity and income of my own.

And I want to write and do my bit for the world too (they are two separate things). What makes me think I can even do it?

All the wonderful women out here, who refuse to ‘sort-out’ their priorities and go all out for their work and their dreams; all the women who do so much more….they give me the strength to chose the stress an attempt to do it all.