Inhale ... exhale. Inhale ... exhale.

Sometimes just breathing is enough.

When it makes sense to look around focus on baby steps. One small step at a time.

AA gets it right when they say you stay sober one day at a time. What gets lost is that sobriety, like any stressful situation, is handled one day/hour/minute at a time.

Years ago I read a book about an air force pilot who went down in a hurricane. He managed to get into his tiny one-man life raft. Then the wave knocked him out of it. Every time he got in the waves would knock him out.

The way he stayed sane and kept going was he would figure that if he dug deep he could take three more. After those three he would dig deep and handle three more. Instead of looking at as a storm with thousands of waves he took them on three at a time. He also stopped counting anything beyond three.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Handle it one small unit at a time. Then stack those small units into bigger units. In the end you have, on the outside, something less than 120 years. Anybody can handle one second. All you have to do is handle one second 3784320000 times.

Inhale ... exhale.