My eldest daughter, Grace, is off this week.
In three weeks, she'll be a science teacher, but she has half term off before returning to her final three weeks of placement.
Through her time at university and teacher training, she's lived in Birmingham, and the flats she's lived in have been nothing better than sh*tholes (in my humble opinion).
I've been staggered at the squalor that students live in, which is absolutely at odds with what my younger daughter Rosie lives in Sheffield, but never mind.
Grace and I were talking yesterday at home, lots of time to catch up and she got a message from one of the girls in her flat to say there was a rat in her kitchen.
They've had mice in the walls, slugs, and all sorts of horrible things, and now they have a rat running through the kitchen.
Grace flipped out at the prospect of going back next Monday to the rat in the house and decided that she didn't actually want to go back now (I've been kind of telling her this for some years).
To have some fun, though, we invented a little equation about the intensity of the crisis based on the level of stress that it can induce, but the amount of time it takes before you have to face it face to face.
We even wrote a little equation which went A = S/T where A is the intensity of the stress that you are going to experience in the crisis against S which is the level of stress that the crisis brings the amount of time it is before this before your face to face.
It's five days before Grace goes back to her house, so she doesn't have to face a rat today. It's probably best that her anticipated stress is not 1000% now.
She has many different options that she could do but the likelihood is, other people will have sorted out the problem before she even gets to it.
A metaphor worth remembering as we load more and more stress into our life today for things that are a long time away.
If your house is on fire, it's probably best to act right now.
If you're worried about what someone might say to you three months from now, you've probably got time to wait without being upset.
Blog Post Number - 3822
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