PENDULUM SWINGS
Doctors and nurses and pharmacists know its chemistry, but adrenaline is something most of us know little about — we only know it when it kicks our energy up manyfold.
And I’m not talking about medical shows on TV where someone jabs a needle into someone’s heart to restart it or a fantastic story of someone lifting a car to save a life …
I’m talking about the high we feel when something magical happens — the surprise scare, the surprise of the near-miss of catastrophe in a car accident you avoided, or the thrill of coming over a hill to a stunning view — we get these mini-shots of our body generating adrenaline to give us a surge of energy when we might otherwise collapse, or a surge of enthusiasm when we are emotional dishrags on the floor.
These moments pick us up or energize us to the point of feeling we can pick up anything heavy or leap tall buildings in a single bound. I had one of those days the other day — little surprise upon little surprise, each one building on my good feelings like layers and icing and more layers and more icing. What an emotion-heavy cake. I was sitting at my desk that evening recounting the good news over the phone when my email burped another piece of good news. These days are few but well worth noting — they don’t guarantee you’ll ever have another one like them, but they reassure us (they do for me) that we’ve still got it, we still have capabilities, and we are valued for what we know and how we execute. At the end, when people call or write out of the blue, it’s not because they don’t know anyone else who is capable of helping them — it’s because of trust.
What caused this thought-flow is not what I’m mentioning in the paragraph above, that’s the back story.
As I hustled around the next morning, running a bit late, I paused at the serpentine ‘at home’ sequence of papers and files on the floor needing attention. One was a bill I can now pay; he’s an old friend who hasn’t been that friendly lately — because people are like that sometimes when you can’t afford to pay them. Recollection of several telephone exchanges over the last two years has been horrible — he bereted me in a brutal fashion, which seems odd looking back, considering I’ve sent far more business his way than he ever sent my way. These times we’ve been through, and the times ahead, are making many of us crankier than we should be — so when our pendulum swings the other way, it’s time to smile and be kinder than usual, and that’s a habit we should all be striving to embed in our daily lives.
