thoughts on the way to the supermarket

I'm going to be away this weekend, when I'd normally post, so I'm putting a little something up now.

... My students this time around (this is the second cohort; the first group graduated in June) like to get me to Google things for them, and I like doing it, but one student asked me for information on stress reduction, and oh man, no quick and cute list of things is going to do it for you, my friend. I was pondering this as I walked to the supermarket this morning. About how easy quick recipes are to give out--and it's not even that they're not accurate, necessarily; yes, deep breaths do help relieve stress--but how insufficient they are. We--by which I mean all of us--need so much more. We don't need a list. We need someone to sit with us, someone to lean on; we need the impossible sometimes, because it's more than the parched world we live in can give to us, let alone any particular person.

But we can make it. Many of us do, day after day, through a patched-together, makeshift system; we make ourselves stronger and also we rely on others, multiple others, and somehow we go forward, and meanwhile, we're also providing support for others; we're part of *their* patched-together, makeshift system. It's all the blind leading the blind--that's how it works.

I'll still try to find her some tips, though.