Archives for category: Anxiety

…Change the experience. It definitely does seem to work that way. This does not diminish the effect of a changing experience also similarly being one route to changing my thinking, this seems quite true, too. How I experience my experience, and what my experience happens to be, influences my thinking… and my thoughts influence my experience, or at least some qualities about it.

I had a ‘what now??’ sort of moment yesterday, walking from one place to another, when I noticed that my face ached rather peculiarly. I took a moment to consider the sensation without panic, and without leading myself astray with fearful thoughts about aging and health. Yep. My face aches. At the edges of my jaw mostly, and a bit more toward my cheeks also, and this is a new development… I consider it further and bust out laughing out loud, startling some geese. Sure my face hurts… I’m smiling that much. I have been smiling, just… smiling… so much since I left my job that my face hurts! That’s a hell of a ‘reality check’ on a major life decision.

Yesterday passed quickly, and also seemed vaguely timeless and enduring. It was a pleasant day and I got quite a few things done. By the end of the day, I was feeling a bit as if the day were not productive, although looking back I no longer understand why. I made room for those feelings, and didn’t beat myself up over it; I accepted that by some definitions of productive, I wasn’t, and also made a point of recognizing that I was, myself, entirely content with what I did get done. This morning as I moved through the apartment, I am struck by how much I got done yesterday, as seen when I look at things with “new eyes”. Awareness really matters. Perspective remains very helpful. “Enough” is achievable.

My traveling partner and I celebrate 5 years this weekend. The thought puts a smile on my face that lights up my heart from within. I may not write over the weekend; my attention will be on Love. We have plans, and I’m very excited about celebrating love with this being I hold in such high regard… Any excuse to hang out together, really. lol 🙂

Today is still Thursday, and an entire day away from the start of the weekend. There are Thursday things to do, some verbs to choose from, and I’ve got a list of all the many things to do that can be done. Looking ahead to the weekend makes it to the list, but it’s well down past mundane chores like ‘take out the trash’, ‘do the laundry’, and ‘do the dishes’.  Much higher up on my list of things to do today are ‘live beautifully’ and ‘enjoy the day’… those seem pretty important, too. 🙂

Today is a good day to stop and smell the roses.

Today is a good day to stop and smell the roses.

…I woke this morning feeling especially appreciate of leisure time in the mornings, very aware that the future may be built on a different routine. My anxiety comes and goes, in general, and seems more or less well-managed, though I’d be more than happy to dispense with it entirely and simply be. I’m still working on that one.

I sat down at my desk with some thoughts in mind, and a very good cup of coffee, and was immediately thwarted by The Grand Distraction – no, not Facebook, but close; Google. Yep. Google politely advised me that I had exceeded my storage limit between going to bed and waking up… (wth??) and I was sternly warned by an alarming red font, bold, and highlighted, that I was at risk of not being able to send or receive email!

Now, realistically, that’s not much of a legitimate crisis, and could have been managed at some point other than ‘now’ – but I am not wired that way, and all the practice over many years has not yet changed my lack of impulse control in some areas much at all… I immediately went into overdrive, deleting redundant files, cached images, copies of copies, archives duplicated elsewhere, saved folders of unsorted zipped images… until…at last… Google grudgingly admitted I am once again under my limit. It was not all that mysterious; I had the benefit of “50 Gigs of free storage with the purchase of a…”, and recently relied upon that to copy precious files while my OS was updated – just in case – and entirely overlooked deleting those copies, and then… last night… my “50 Gigs of free storage [for one year]…” expired. Check the fine print. 🙂

Life is full of fine print. Be sure to read it. 🙂

Much of my leisurely morning is… gone. Filled. Used up. Completed. It is in the past, already. I’m pretty certain I didn’t put the time to the best possible use – or the most fulfilling. I’m irked with Google over it, although it is hardly their issue that I still react as often as I respond to life’s small challenges. There’s a lesson worth studying there.

Today is an ordinary enough work day. My last day at my current job will be Friday. Feels a bit strange to simply say so. Choosing to make this change is more than a little scary, too. I want to feel more certain that I am doing ‘the right thing’… but… there are more than a few ‘right things’ I could choose to do, each very dependent on how I view the circumstances, the options, the opportunities, and what matters most.  What does matter most? Is it healthcare – or cash flow? Is it contentment – or financial gain? Is it fulfillment – or being prepared for retirement? Is it meeting my own needs over time – or providing for my family now? Is it “always” a choice?  (Quick answer – no; most uses of ‘always’ or ‘never’ can be safely assumed to be hyperbole, resulting in logical fallacy, being immediately ‘not true’ because it takes just one exception to disprove them. Still…always a best practice to test your assumptions. There. Enjoy that.)

Life goes on about its business in a mostly very usual way, in spite of the fierce storm of change so imminent on my horizon. I find myself generally fairly calm, hopeful that ‘it all works out’… getting enough leisure to take care of me, finding out my health concerns may be more easily addressed than I feared perhaps, then conveniently falling into a dream job well before cash reserves run out… I know one thing – there are verbs involved.

Although it was a busy day, there was time for the garden. "Baby Love" blooms first this year.

Although it was a busy day, there was time for the garden. “Baby Love” blooms first this year.

Today is a good day to recognize that change is, and to enjoy ‘now’.

I have appointments today, and timing matters. I reserved a car for the day to simplify things, and knowing I have some baggage around ‘time’ (and timing), I made sure to consider possible twists and complications, and allowed myself what seemed sufficient time.

I woke on time this morning, and quickly departed to pick up the car… The bus I planned to take to the transit center didn’t come. I stood patiently waiting for the next one; I knew I had enough time.

I got to the transit center just prior to the start of my car reservation feeling pretty splendid that I didn’t get stressed out about the bus… No car. I mean, no cars at all, anywhere in the car-share lot. Not good. Timing… I take a deep breath, remind myself I planned for all manner of contingencies, and even allowed myself time to write for a moment, later… (spoiler alert – I’m writing!) I call the car-share service, and they admit that indeed it looks like the car I reserved has not yet been returned (um… I know this…). They phone the person who has the car, and let me know that although that person is not answering their phone, the car ‘is now in motion’. They adjust my reservation and give me a bit of a discount for the inconvenience. I breathe. I wait. The person arrives with the car and drops it off without a word of courtesy or regret. I am reminded of the ‘state the world is in’ and I am not puzzled why. I head on home to shower, dress – and omg, have coffee!

I find myself comfortably back on track, and wondering how many such circumstances over the course of an adult lifetime were needlessly complicated (and matters of time and timing significantly worsened) by having some crazy freak out over being a few minutes later than planned, or some sequence of events being not entirely in the sequence intended, or just having some plan fall completely to pieces resulting in a thoroughly unscripted, spontaneous, wildly different experience? So far, this morning is just fine, complications and all.

I look myself over in the mirror, dressed for the day, feeling myself on the edge of finding fault with all sorts of details that seemed not only satisfactory at some other point, but in some cases actually fulfilling and a bit… awesome. Funny how the bit of stress over time feeds so much discontent, later, and about things so unrelated to time, or each other. It’s something to consider another time.

Oh, right… time. It’s time. Today is a good day to give myself plenty of time – and patience. Today is a good day to be enough. 🙂

This morning is quiet. The noise of the trains coming and going in the distance seems muted. The traffic on the nearby busy street is still infrequent, and hushed. The loudest sounds this morning are my fingers on the keyboard, and the occasional clatter of raindrops spattering window panes and eaves. I am in a manageable amount of pain.

Change is a thing. I find myself embracing it willfully, constructively, and using that profound power of choice to craft something of my life that suits me better. It is a process that is both incredibly exciting, and indescribably nerve-wracking. My anxiety comes and goes, and between anxious moments I feel… alive.  I noticed quickly that my anxiety most commonly surfaces in the context of taking action in my own favor in any way that doesn’t seem to ‘fit the mold’ I’ve been nudged into over a lifetime. From my perspective, that makes the anxiety itself quite suspect, and I look upon it now as ‘baggage’, more than as any legitimate warning of danger or risk. When it surfaces again, I make a point of ‘letting it go’. Yes, it comes back, and sometimes quite quickly – I repeat the process, letting it go, soothing myself with meditation or intellectual engagement in some other area of interest. It dissipates. It returns later. It is a process. Surely it will take at least as many repetitions of letting go of the anxiety to teach myself the lesson that the anxiety itself is the illusion, the baggage, the issue… didn’t it take many such repetitions to build the experience of chronic disordered anxiety in the first place? 🙂

What better time than now?

What better time than now?

I heard birds singing outside my window. The sky is light now. I hear more of the steady distant roar of commuter traffic, and the wail of the train seems louder, too, as if to make a point of getting the attention of sleepy morning professionals hurry in to the office. I remind myself to get some real down time very soon – maybe a couple of weeks off between jobs, or a weekend camping out in the trees now that the weather is sufficiently mild [for my own needs]?

Today is a good day for choices, for beginnings, for next steps and new things. Today is a good day to change my world.

Between what? Between plans and outcomes, perhaps, or between what was and what may be, at some future point – in either case, I live just the one moment, ‘now’, and what I choose to do with it seems to matter so very much more than what may be planned for the future, or may have been planned for the past. It’s a quiet morning to contemplate time, planning, and outcomes. I find change far less unnerving when I plan things out, then prepare a good Plan B, then follow that with some alternate plans, contingency plans, wild cards plans, and anticipate potential outcomes of the unplanned possibilities – rendering them much less unexpected. Doesn’t matter that much, though; life tends to be quite unscripted and spontaneous regardless of planning… Which doesn’t have any tendency at all to stop me attempting to plan my life. 🙂

flowers

Perspective. 

The emotional climate seems very nice ‘here’. The emotional weather lately has also been sunny and mild. Storms of change are on the horizon, piling up like distant clouds – will it be a spring shower, or a powerful thing crafted of nightmares, hurricane winds, and monsoon rains, that sweeps aside all other considerations for a time? For planning purposes, scale matters a lot – or seems to. Opportunity sometimes seems to transmute change from something uncontrollable and potentially devastating to something almost festive…a see-saw on life’s playground. Here I stand, between moments, between metaphors, staring at the horizon on this perplexing and wonderful journey… still smiling, still okay, and feeling fairly ‘ready for it’.

flowers

Life is busy. It’s easy to miss details that matter.

I need to get some solid contemplative time alone at some point in the very near future. I find myself considering a day trip to the coast or up to ‘the big city’ (Seattle is the nearest of those), or a hike out in the trees, somewhere more distant than nearby nature parks. In any case, I need time to sort some things out with care, whether it is at my desk, at my easel, on foot, or traveling by some other means; my mind needs time and opportunity to wander. Easily done… there are verbs involved.

Walking my own path, one step at a time.

Walking my own path, one step at a time.

Today is a good day to walk on, to consider the alternatives, to choose wisely and with great care. Today is a good day to take care of me, to love without reservations, and to listen deeply. Today is a good day to “stay on the path”… It’s definitely leading somewhere.