My stress points are chest and stomach. Those are the places I feel it. If I wake up in the morning knowing it is a big day for busy, busy, busy, my chest tightens, and my stomach aches a bit.

Right now, my chest and stomach are aching a bit, because I have an entire day to myself. It is the only day to myself for another week, because tomorrow is Monday. That’s nonsense. I shouldn’t be stressing out about a time 24 hours from now, but my body somehow understands this as routine, and aches none the less.

I am sensible some of the time about issues that overwhelm me, so when I start feeling achy about stress for no good reason, I ask myself the cause of it. While my brain starts populating reasons in my head for why I am feeling stressed, (business school, work, projects, classes) I realized that each of these thoughts came so quickly like BAM BAM BAM and thinking about them at that speed was actually speeding up my heart beat and the uncomfortable churning in my stomach. It made me wonder if by somehow thinking quickly and chaotically, I was directly causing my body to do the same.

So how fast am I thinking? We can measure the speed of sound and light, but what about thought?

I experimented a little by thinking slowly, as if I were drunk or on some kind of lethargic drug, or a child seeing things for the first time. Why was I thinking of a billion things at the same time? That kind of chaos would surely crash the system, and those billions things aren’t happening right now. 

Right now, my roommate is in the next room with his brother playing video games. I am not at work. Right now, there’s a plane humming outside my window, I am not in class. Right now, is Sunday, 1:33pm, I am publishing a blog post. I am outside of tomorrow. I can’t even see it. It doesn’t even exist.

For a few blissful moments, thinking about one thing at a time actually warmed my chest a little, and there was a small bit of relief. It didn’t last long, but I feel like there is hope in thinking this way. Slowly, one thought at a time. Doing things slowly makes absorbing the present easier, the moments we often breeze past because we are constantly thinking about and working towards those billion things that haven’t even happened yet.

I know. We live in a fast-paced world, and the sometimes the city won’t let you slow down. But that’s because maybe we have to learn to get out of its way. The slower traveler on the side of the road may not get there on time, but gets there eventually.

This song helps.

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Monique Muro

Monique is an exceedingly happy human from LA. She runs the blog A Novel Quest, and writes. A lot.

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