Tempers heated up yesterday at the community-building site.  We were working on the kitchen extension.  It is coming along nicely.   But a couple of personalities flared.  Sparks flew.  It was the pressure, I think.  As little of it as there was, it was a bit too much.

We are trying to get things done, you see.  We have a sense of urgency (for us).  Therefore we have pressure.

I have come to learn that pressure is relative and, further, one can learn to accept greater and greater pressure as one’s career or personal issues escalate.  What I didn’t know was that, once that pressure eases and things return to a personal and natural equilibrium (different for each of us) one’s ability to ‘kick it up a notch’ weakens.  Let me explain:

I won’t claim to have endured much pressure or any great stresses in my life.  I will claim to thinking that I was, tho.  At the time.  Now and then.  In retrospect, I never had to make life and death decisions, I was never responsible or accountable to thousands.  I didn’t live in the chaos of war.  And, thank God, my wife and kids are fine (perfect in every way, actually).  So, quite probably, my experience with stress and pressure was normal and reasonable for my era and the location in which I lived.

Let’s say, that on a scale of 1 to a hundred, I experienced stress – at the most – at 25 (now and then) and that I likely averaged 15.  Not a lot, but I averaged 15 for decades.  And I handled it well, if I do say so.

But now I live in an environment with an average stress level of 2 or 3.  Five on a busy, frustrating town day.  The needle on the scale barely moves off the ‘equilibrium’ setting most of the time.  I am r-e-l-a-x-e-d.  I am so relaxed that I have noticed that I have to ‘kick it up’ a notch just to drive down Vancouver Island.  That’s right – one of the greatest sources of stress and pressure in my life right now is catching ferries, driving a few hundred kilometers and being somewhere ‘down island’ or in Vancouver on time.  I can feel the stress build, the closer I get to Nanaimo.

After Nanaimo, I start to ‘numb up’ and tense all my neck muscles, ya know?

Imagine that!  Getting close to Nanaimo in traffic is measurably more stressful than anything I live with up here.  Years ago I used to cover that distance easily and do two stressful mediations in one day.  And get home in time for dinner guests!

I can’t nor will I attempt to do that anymore.

And that general declaration is true for many people here, too.  More so, I think for some who have lived even longer more remotely, maybe alone and who have ‘interacted’ with Vancouver and the outside world even less.

As I said, stress and pressure are relative but most of the folks up here live and have lived at lower levels of sensory assault, pace, duties to be performed and, perhaps, most significantly, with lesser personal encounters to manage than urbanites.

Unlike city-folks who have to navigate the sidewalks, parking lots, elevators and offices filled with other people all the time, up here we can spend the whole day on the beach or in the forest.  And many have done so for much of their lives.

So some feel pressure just coming to community workshop day more than others.

Don’t worry.  There is no BIG trouble in paradise.  We’re fine.  It is just an observation.  It is hard NOT to notice, actually.  Not only are we more sensitive to pressure and stress that most urban others would not even notice, we are also, on average, much older than the average age of an urban population.  At the workshop, for instance, there isn’t a soul under 50 and all but a few are over 60.

We are less hardened to the work-with-others scene and we are less capable of learning it at this stage of our lives.

So the typical person coming to ‘cooperate’ and ‘mingle’ and ‘work-in-community’ on Wednesdays is 60 plus, lives alone and has, for the most part, NOT done this teamwork-thing for years.

Furthermore, we have had to be independent.   A lot of things get done because we do them by ourselves.  No one helps.  As a consequence, we have our strengths, we have our weaknesses and we have our own personal ways.

Historically, not a lot had to be compromised or adjusted because of the ways of others.  Personality conflicts could be dealt with simply by avoidance.  We have the space for that.  There was little to force civil interaction.  No one knocked the chips off of shoulders, taught compromise, preached tolerance or threatened paycheques so as to push square personalities into corporate round holes.  People out here don’t have a long history of having to mesh with others.

Don’t get me wrong.  The above is not to suggest that we can’t cooperate or socialize or get along.  We can!  We can mesh!  And we do!  But we also can choose NOT TO whenever we wish.  We can leave before we are ‘compromised’ should we feel that compromise is looming.  We have the freedom to leave. And we exercise that, too.  We can maintain our own sense of personal equilibrium because we are free to do so.

Committing to a community project restricts that freedom.  Only a little.  But it does.  And that can cause a bit of stress.  A project that takes on a schedule and has plans and supervision……well, now we are talking some real pressure.  Nerves get strung.  Some of them tight.

God help the poor soul who comes to the exercise with expectations.  That is failure spelled i-n-e-v-i-t-a-b-l-e.  For things to work best out here, people pair with whom they choose, do the chore that they find interesting and do it at their own pace.  Yes, things will get done differently, but they will get done.

You know what they say…….”If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”