When things aren’t working, even the tiniest time-out = magic.

Yesterday things were very much not working, so I ended up making a list of the various ways available to me when I need to push the reset button.

Here it is.

Time is funny.

It was supposed to be just for a month. We’d see each other weekends and in between my shifts at work.

We didn’t. Not really. Renovations took longer. My best friend went to London and I house-sat for a while, then took care of her ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough patch.

Three months.

I went to the States for a visit. Stayed with a girlfriend in Chicago. Went on a road trip. Place, perspective. Breathing room.

Four months.

The message I got from my brain yesterday (my post-flailing newly-descrambled charged-up brain) was as follows:

Replace worry.

To which I said, huh?

And then I got this:

Replace worry with curiosity.

Burnout is part of life.

You cannot learn where your limits are except by exceeding them.

We learn to recognize the edges by visiting them.

And those boundaries change. That’s part of being alive.

So every once in a while, even if you’re cautious and intelligent and have a conscious relationship with yourself and your stuff, you’re going to get burnt out.

Because you’ll be testing those edges and end up on the wrong side for a while, until you carve out recovery time.

That process of venturing out and coming back is part of being alive.

From the jump to the path.

When I moved back to Israel, it scared me to pieces.

I was telling a friend and he said, “It’s like throwing yourself into a black hole, right?”

Exactly. That was exactly what it was like.

“Here’s the thing nobody tells you,” he said. “There is no black hole. You go from living your life here to living your life there. It’s just you and your life, with slight variations. No holes.”

He was right. I’ve moved countries twice since then and there was no black hole.

What there is instead is this big Continuum of You (ooh, fake band name!), and wherever you are on it is a part of you. You can contain different cultural and emotional identities at the same time.

That’s because you’re not constantly hurling yourself into space or off of cliffs.

You’re just going for a walk, and around this next bend is a new piece of terrain. But it’s not really all that different from what you already know.

It was kind of like being in a film by Emir Kusturica. Only louder and more piercing.

Even with my earplugs in, my fantasies about hurling tomatoes at them grew stronger and stronger, until the only thing stopping me from rushing them and pelting the band members with rotten vegetables was the total lack of available produce.

I wanted to run them over with a produce truck.

I wanted to grab the guy with the tin can by the collar and scream “THIS IS NOT MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

We come unglued. Well, I do. Hi. And that’s exactly when I get tempted to become the shoe-thrower. When external situations — triggers — are setting off the hard.

I’m not such a big fan of the phrase self-love (though the concept is pretty flipping awesome) just because it tends to set off my shoulds, which really stresses me out.

It’s just too easy for me to go straight into oh god now I have to love myself too in addition to all the other things I can’t do?!

So my personal translation for this concept is “liking myself anyway”.

And then it’s way easier for me to start with something like this:

Okay, is it possible that even though things are really hard right now, there is still some part of me that can like myself anyway? Maybe? A little?

And if not, can letting myself be where I am be a part of this whole kindness thing — as long as I don’t force myself into more kindness than I can stand?

And that usually eventually leads me back to the place where I can start feeling loving towards myself.

Once you’ve stopped asking but how come how come how come and you’ve stopped fighting with the feeling, you’ll probably know why you feel like dirt.

Or at least, you’ll have some pretty decent theories.

Instead of trying to convince yourself that these are stupid reasons and here’s why you actually shouldn’t be feeling like dirt, let those reasons seem like okay reasons.

Talk to yourself as if it were your best friend in the entire world who felt like dirt and had every reason to.

Wow. No kidding. Of course you feel like dirt after X happened. That’s a really hard thing to go through. And you’re catching up on sleep. And you’ve been dealing with all these other things. And things are changing in your life like crazy now. Who wouldn’t feel like dirt right now?

This time, though, it wasn’t a mystery anymore.

It was so completely obvious that I was the one sabotaging the show and that I couldn’t keep grumbling about how come nobody pays attention when I want them to.

It is completely clear to me that I’m going to be ridiculously grateful (at least, at some point in the future) for the past few months of agonizing arm pain.

So if I’m going to end up feeling all appreciative of the thing that totally sucks right now anyway, I might as well take a moment or two to acknowledge all the good stuff that I will be loving later.

Not as a way of negating what is true for me right now. Not as a way of bulldozing through my discomfort and pain.

And definitely not making myself commit to some cheesy gratitude practice for its own sake, because forced compassion? Not very compassionate.