Under ‘Pressure’?

I wonder sometimes if this is progress. Modern life with it’s ‘pressures’. Pressures which aren’t even real.

Are you good enough? Thin enough? Successful enough? Bright enough?

Let’s imagine that you are. (Not that I’m saying you’re not, *you* totally are… have you lost some weight?)

But I’m guessing you’ve still got something else to worry about. Perhaps you’re not popular enough. Perhaps you’ve had a string of sucky relationships.

We create this. We create the ‘pressure’. But why? Why do we want so much?

My Nanny’s in a care home. She can’t dress herself, feed herself, or walk anymore. She can’t communicate properly. Sounds (and sometimes even words) fall from her lips, but, they’re just sounds. There’s no thread to follow. Good old fashioned senile dementia.

Her care home asked us to complete a questionnaire about her and her life. Within the questionnaire there was a section headed up ‘ambitions’.

See, my Nanny didn’t really have ambitions.

My Nanny wanted her children to be happy. She worked as an accounts clerk. She liked chocolate, cake, cigarettes and jigsaw puzzles. She enjoyed playing bowls and dominoes. She loved clotted cream so much she’d happily sit and eat a whole tub of the stuff on it’s own.

So, she didn’t subject herself to the sort of ‘pressure’ that I do. She didn’t worry about her career. She didn’t worry about whether or not she was good enough, thin enough, successful enough or bright enough.

Instead, she created a whole new world of worry for herself. Bless her. She worried herself sick - about everything and anything. She created a whole new set of pressures for herself.

So it brings me back to the why. Why do we create this?

Is it our way of feeling alive? Does it need to feel like a struggle?

Is there something primal in us that needs to survive so much that even when we’re not actually under threat we feel the need to conjure it?