Werner Heisenberg was here — or maybe he wasn’t

The artist is, frenzied, pacing back and forth.  Piles of torn hair litter the floor, and there is a look to his eye that would send sane men skittering back.  A bit of white froth is at his lip.

I seem to be stressed.

There’s reason, of course — everyone has reason for what they do, however unreasonable it might be.  Mine are, generally, internally coherent.  That’s not happenstance.  I spend a major portion of my energy keeping an analytical eye on myself, checking things over and making certain I’ve not skipped my tracks.

I spend, in fact, what the philosophers call a buttload of time navel-gazing.

And there, the rub.

Backing up a bit:  I seem to be stressed.  There are many changes in my life just now.  We are about to move, about to take on roommates, about to make add some changes to how we treat money, budgetary changes, income changes.  There have been changes thrust upon us; both our workplaces have experienced upheaval.
Both of us are carrying greater load at work than we can manage, and more is coming.

That’s a lot of change.  Change — good or bad — produces stress.

Stress produces reaction.  Reaction, in me, produces spot-checks on my behaviors and thoughts.  The spot-checks produce careful analysis, which, in the end, will produce a shift in paradigm and my behaviors.

Again, I do this pretty much all the time.  I’m wrought, I look myself over, consider if my internal landscape needs modifying, and then do so.  A habit, it seems to me, that will continue to refine my decisions and behaviors, leading eventually to Buddha.

Part of the process, for me, is to challenge the base assumptions for fault.  This morning I was raking through the previous day, looking for ways to improve things.  I noted that I was doing so, and noted that, since there have been stressors, I was doing this rather more than usual, there being more opportunity and perceived need.

But I was in self-analysis and challenge-the-base-premise mode, so I pursued the thought.

Change begets stress, stress begets behaviors and emotions, which beget spot-checking which begets personal change –

–which begets stress, stress begets –

–

– oh, hell.  The more that happens, the more I am unbalanced, the more I think, the more happens.  I am perpetual energy.

My CBT is a mental disorder.

Crossposted from Epinephrine & Sophistry