Mental Traffic

"We had to shut down cause we're out of parts. There's almost enough widgets over there now to use up every part that's coming on the shipment tomorrow," said the guy on the shift before me.
"Well, we gotta do something," said my slave driving coworker, the guy that like to run double the widgets per day of any other shift. The shifts that have twice as many people as us.

---

It was a bad start to my Friday last week. I was mad. While I was at one of the better stations in my department, a station I'm exceptional at, I still let it get to me, and ran around the department sarcastically telling everyone "we gotta do something!"

I was having a hard time breathing. Not physically, but in a regulatory sense. I like to relax a little on Fridays, especially when we're half a week ahead; no doubt contributing to our parts shortage. I wasn't breathing deeply, and was mostly breathing through my mouth, a bad habit I've been doing really well on breaking.

When break time came, I set an alarm and sat down cross legged in my station, closed my eyes, and focused on breathing. I ignored the thoughts of just stopping and letting him run out of widgets to make. I ignored thoughts of yelling. I ignored thoughts, and breathed. None of that shit mattered as much as I was letting it.

As I relaxed, I drifted into a daydream. I could have controlled it and played with it like I usually do, but I didn't have the energy and was curious where it would go. I was driving through an old town. The town my mom grew up in in West Texas. It's damn near a ghost town, with a few hundred people living there, all of whom are aging cotton farmers. The soil there isn't red anymore; they mined all the nutrients out of it with industrial farming.

In this town, there's a stop light downtown. I don't remember if there's more anywhere else in town. I was driving in my red truck, and traffic was busy. I mean big city busy. Not West Texas ghost town busy. I caught the red light, watched, and waited. Breathing. Don't focus on them. Watch, wait, breathe.

Source

As I watched and waited, breathing, the only one stopped at the intersection, everything dwindled down. Eventually there were no other cars on the road. I sat there breathing a little longer and decided to carry on my way, clear of distraction.

Then my alarm went off and I set back to work, with my distracting mental traffic gone.

All action for the good of all.

Nate.

P.S. thanks a lot to the #mindfulmonday clan in @naturalmedicine for turning me on to this mindful breathing thing. @bewithbreath, @vibesforlife, @shinobi, and @riverflows primarily. I usually practice it as I lay down for the naps that I take on my lunch break, but never like I did on Friday. And the symbolism in the daydream was immediately obvious to me.

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