I cope with stress in a rather unusual way: by counting down. For months now, I’ve been counting down the days until I leave for Kyrgyzstan (1), the days until we are sworn in (59), the days until our close of service (825), and the days to several other milestones along the way.
Countdowns allow me to break down life into manageable chunks of time, which paradoxically usually involves increasing the number of units. A year sounds like a really long time, when in reality, it’s a sequence of 12 months, or 52 weeks, or 365 days. A day is broken down to about 16 waking hours, and if experience has shown, days bleed into weeks into years very quickly.
I don’t remember exactly when I started doing this. I think it probably had something to do with measuring out skating practice sessions. Every session, which was about 45 minutes, we usually had to do a full performance of our program, sometimes twice. Now, that performance at the height of my career took about 3 minutes and 30 seconds of all out sprinting. Naturally, that’s not a particularly pleasant experience from a pain standpoint. But I had just survived 3 minutes and 30 seconds immediately before, and immediately before that, and immediately before that. In fact, it’s less than the length of an average pop song. If I could sprint for the length of a pop song, then I could make it to the end of that program.
I used hours to break down standardized tests in high school. If a test was four hours, then I could easily make it through by taking it one hour at a time. “This will all be over by lunchtime,” was a frequent mantra. Now I use the same tactic when I run marathons. It’s just 26 repetitions of running for 10 minutes, albeit with a few hills, dancing hamburgers, and maybe a few spilled Dixie cups of Gatorade.
When I first heard the phrase “525,600 minutes” in the opening of the musical Rent, I thought to myself, “is that ALL? Are there really only that many minutes in a year?” A minute is such, if you’ll pardon the pun, a minute measure of time that, when I phrase my service in terms of “two sets of 525,600 minutes,” it really doesn’t seem that long after all.
In fact, two years can go by faster than you might think. I lived in Europe for two years, and that came and went in a flash. I spent two years at one college, then two years in another, and have been out of school for about two years now. Two years goes by much faster than we care to admit, and now that I’ve managed to break it down into chunks of months (Half of this year, all of 2016, and half of 2017, with a few months tacked on either end), it really doesn’t seem like that long of a time at all.
One of the added benefits of counting? I found out that I’ll be departing for Kyrgyzstan on the 8888th day of my life. If Chinese superstition regarding the number 8 is to be believed, then I’m in for a pretty awesome twenty-seven months.
I mean, 825 days. And counting.