So this morning was weird.

It felt normal, hopeful, a Saturday of fun. Then I took my kids to get some cinnamon rolls and I fell apart.

They were wiggly (at 6, 4, 1, was this a surprise?), they were grumpy (the 6 year old had insisted on a long sleeve shirt. In July. In Louisiana. It was 89 degrees at 8:30am. The 4 year old? He’d pulled a Joey Tribbiani with no fewer than 5 tees. And the 14 month old is on day 7 of a summer cold). I was worried they’d break the water glasses, I was worried they’d run into people, I was worried they’d get germs all over everyone’s food.

I was not able to access calm or steadiness. I reverted to stern and fierce and threaten-y. But I think it was more than that.

I felt all jittery and amped up. I came home with them and had a headache. I was tired, I was light-headed, I my body felt tense (especially my face & jaw). I sat down for a few minutes. Then I started yawning.

Yawning is my tell.

It’s my downshift, when I’m coming out of an over-alert state and beginning to reboot. I don’t know why I got so worked up this morning (sometimes I can figure it out: an anniversary of some sort, a thing someone said or did that reminded me of another time a similar thing happened and its impact on me, something I smelled or something I did that reminded my body of another event in the past), and I may not be able to ever identify it — that’s frustrating, sure — but the important thing is how we respond when we come to notice.

It’s what I’ve learned through yoga; a timeless truth that finally made sense to me when applied physically. There might be a stretch you’re doing, and it’s way harder than it was last time you did it. Maybe you’ve been working that muscle out and it’s sore. Maybe you’re exhausted from the week and everything just feels harder. Maybe you pulled the muscle while opening the fridge earlier and you didn’t even know it. We might be able to pinpoint the origin, but we also might not be able to trace its provenance.

Here’s the question: does it matter?

Does it matter where the difficulty has come from? The truth is that it doesn’t matter, not really. Sometimes the reason for something gives me some comfort in dealing with the problem, but when the rubber hits the road, the problem just is, and the solution still needs to be found and executed.

So: I never figured out why I was so agitated and activated this morning. But what I did do was apologize and reconnect with my boys after my harshness, and I took deep breaths and massaged my tight jaw and ears and scalp. I scanned my body and noticed the tightness in my stomach and the ache in my head, and just acknowledging those things, spending a breath or two giving my brain’s attention to these body symptoms, helped to start untangle and relieve them.

We don’t always know why we feel what we feel, and that’s okay; the healing thing is to acknowledge the truth of what’s happening, so that we can let it go. Even if I don’t know why my body and brain had such big responses to the morning, I know I must be processing something, and there’s such great freedom in noticing it and letting it go. Then I don’t have to hold or carry the agitation any more, I won’t need to process this particular bit of jittery tension again, it’s gone (I am of the belief that if we don’t process it by acknowledging its presence, the tension will just stay in our bodies and minds, stuck and stirred-in to come up again at another time. We do get do-overs).