This past week, I was reminded of the time my friend, Cathy, loaned me her pressure cooker. I had 8 pounds of brisket to get ready for a 4th-of-July party the next day and she said this device would do it in a snap. If by "snap" she meant "in under 3 hours," I wasn't paying attention.
By the time I popped open that lid 4 hours later, the brisket had transformed itself into the densest, most delicious compressed beef cube on the face of the earth. About the size of a piece of toast now--and me without my Jesus Super Powers!--I wasn't sure it would feed the 50 or so people heading to my house the next day.
That's the first and last time I've used a pressure cooker. But, sitting across from my school friends at lunch this week, I was reminded of what must go on inside a pressure cooker. My friends looked haggard and shell-shocked, like extras on a Walking Dead set. I could feel all that weight resting heavily on everyone in that room.
Two weeks into May, a school becomes one gigantic pressure cooker, an asylum of fools collapsing under the weight of life bearing down on them. Smouldering under it all are a thousand different things--the pressure of graduating, the knock-knock of a final project, the drum roll of yearbook distribution, the state championship, the impending retirement, the stressed-out parents frantically fiddling for hope in the bottom of their purses, the rush to pack up rooms for the summer.
U2's "Running to Stand Still" must have been written one May afternoon, under the bleachers of a high-school gymnasium.
By mid morning Friday, I had reached up to snap off the top of my own pressure cooker, nearly a thousand yearbooks having passed through my hands in the past 18 hours. And finally, amidst dozens of empty boxes, handfuls of torn receipts and with the angry-parent phone call in my rear-view mirror, I felt light and giddy again.
The thing about pressure is that, when it finally lifts (and it always does), everything seems all shiny and new again. Not even the prospect of working my way through a dozen slices of graduation cake or reading 25 versions of that final essay will dampen my spirits now.
I have again made it out of the pressure cooker, all my happiness comfortably condensed within me.
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