I’ve been kind of stressed out a bit the past couple days. However, today I am not. Why is that? It has nothing to do with the fact that my finals are almost over (in fact, given that I have a paper to turn in tomorrow that I’ve barely started, I should be extremely stressed out, but I’m not). It has nothing to do with the fact that I am going home soon. It has nothing to do with the fact that, after tomorrow, I will have neither school nor work until January 15, 2005. No, the reason I am not as stressed out is much simpler: I realized that the source of my stress was me.

I think people often create stress for themselves. They worry so much about making everything perfect in their lives that they forget that life is never perfect, and you just have to go with the flow. I’ve noticed that, while I am normally a fairly relaxed person, I often worry too much about certain things in life, at least during certain periods of time. The source of my worry is often my relationships with other people. I worry too much about making things perfect that sometimes I over-analyze my interactions with other people, and I try too hard to force things with them.

When dealing with life, it’s important to stay cool and chill. That’s how I normally am, and that works for me. The only time when things do go awry is when I over-worry about things going awry. Sometimes you need to stop taking things so seriously and just go with the flow. Let the path lead where it may, and don’t try to force it into a certain direction.

Of course, that isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take risks in life. Sometimes you have to do things to guide the outcome of a situation in a certain direction. But mostly you can’t try to force things, because they generally won’t work out exactly the way you want them to, and you might antagonize people or situations in the process.

Basically, living life is pretty easy if you follow these two simple rules:

1. Take some risks, but don’t go overboard.
2. Don’t be a pathetic loser. (Here’s the Pathetic Loser Rule of Thumb: if you have to ask if doing something will make you a pathetic loser, it probably will.)