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?
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.
