Another day has begun.

I woke up with a daze in my head, trying to wake from a tiring weekend. My girlfriend is staying over my place for a week. She just received her visa for Canada and will be leaving in less than a week.

Oh well. It is sad. No matter how I try to make sense of things, I can’t deny that I still feel sad now that she is finally leaving for a new job in another country, miles and miles away. The place is cold and the culture is way much far from ours.

It’s a mix of emotions. As much as I want her to stay, this has been her dream since college. Yes, we discuss these things, especially in college when we were making plans for a career and stuff. This should be the time when she’ll reach for things that she wants herself. She is strong in a way that she always find ways to get what she wants.

It’s comforting though that she has cousins in Canada. Although they are more than an hour of plane ride away, at least she gets to spend her Christmas with her extended family and friends. I just don’t want her to be always lonely wherever she will be.

Sometimes though, as I am trying to live a new life myself, I sometimes fail to be there for her. She has always been her jolliest, most adorable self and sometimes I can’t even give her back a smile or a joke to make her laugh. I don’t want to immerse myself in so much grief just because of the everyday stress of a new job and a new place. But sometimes, a person simply forgets the essentials of life throughout a day’s struggle for survival.

She will be dealing with more difficult situations where she is going and I will be the stupidest jerk if I won’t be there for her in this exciting yet uncertain time of her life. For sure she will have crying times, sad times, even maybe depressing times. I hope I will be there always, as much as I can.

There is so much to discover in this life. And she is out to get it. I wish all the best the world could give. I send her my prayers because I know, in the saddest moments of this new chapter in her life, God would always be her comfort and peace.

There might be rains at times but you don’t get to see a rainbow without it. There might be storms coming but with it comes strengthening and healing. May you never forget to look up to God for comfort and as well, thanksgiving in all that He has given you.

To you my dear, I send my butterfly kisses.

Having a lot of concerns and some other urgent and more important things to think about makes you decide to do so. Sometimes, all you want to do after a stressful day of public commuting, walking a lot, going to different high-rise buildings and public commuting once again is get home quick, play your favorite music, have a hearty dinner and have a good night sleep. Because tomorrow, everything is back to what it was the day before.

When you are in that situation, I think you will really learn to let go of arguments with taxi drivers, over-priced products, required monetary tips, nosy landladies, and many other stuff you’d typically call a day-to-day irritation. Of course, this does not include life-threatening situations and highly inexcusable offenses.

Living this new life pushes you to filter out things to react about and things to let go. Life is so beautiful to be marred simply by people who may or may not irritate you intentionally. I realized that the more you react to things that do not deserve a reaction, the more you waste your energy on things not relevant to you. The laws of physics state that every action requires a certain amount of energy which is changed from one form to another in the process. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. If I translate this, it would be that a certain action caused a person outside of you to spend some amount of energy which, intentionally or not, irritated you. When you let it irritate you, you tend to spend more energy to compensate for the insult.

I guess a good practice is to create a certain limit as to which a certain irritant can affect you – a buffer layer around you if I may call it. This buffer layer allows you to absorb the tolerable and the intolerable. The definition of such would then depends from person to person.

Well, so much for that analogy which seemed to have just complicated my point. The bottom of it is this: not sweating the small stuff may actually be the best thing to do when facing a lot of stress. It creates a preprogrammed list of things to spend and not to spend your energy on. It saves one time and energy which you might as well spend in doing things that you like – sports or hobby, whatever pleases you. I think this can really do a great part if you want to have a good stress management system. Pretty fun! Take the challenge.