anxiety

Unexpected Warmth in the Season of Ice

I spent last weekend in Minneapolis, visiting my friend Mike. Friday night and Saturday were very nice. I truly enjoyed the time spent in low-key activities such as attending a high school girl’s basketball game, shopping with Mike’s sons for their winter formal fashions, and a delicious dinner at primebar in Uptown (if you go there, definitely get the steak flatbread; we had ours without the bechamel sauce).

It was great. But…

…I couldn’t relax. I received calls and texts from work throughout the evening on Friday, and again both Saturday morning and afternoon – it was difficult to disconnect from the stress of the work week when it followed me to another state! In addition, I was concerned about my Dad, fighting double pneumonia in Albuquerque. To top things off, I worried obsessively about the impending weather. When I left town on Friday, all weather reports were for some mixed precipitation on Sunday, but the forecast wasn’t particularly alarming. However, by Saturday, it became clear that ice was likely to be a major issue.

I needed to get back to Cedar Rapids on Sunday! I had so much to do! This couldn’t be happening! (Insert frantic hair pulling and frown-y face here)

Sunday morning, I was up by 7:15, disappointed to see the Iowa DOT website covered with the pink dots denoting 100% ice covered roadways. As I continued to check the Iowa and Minnesota DOT sites every fifteen minutes for the next two hours, the news got worse. Dark purple sections of road (travel not advised), tow bans (for those unlucky souls who were on the road and ended up in a ditch), and hazard triangles showing the locations of crashes proliferated. By 10:30 the weather radar and road maps had finally convinced me – the drive home simply was not going to happen until Monday.

And then the most amazing thing happened: within minutes of accepting that the situation was out of my hands, every part of me relaxed. I don’t mean I sat a little more comfortably on Mike’s white IKEA loveseat. I mean, deeply relaxed. Muscles let go of tension, blood slowed to a normal pace in my veins, breathing became deep and regular.

The rest of the day, we took our time. Mike scoured his kitchen sink, I scoured my blog reader for interesting posts. I showered. Mike showered longer. When we left his apartment for lunch, the morning rain was just switching over to ice pellets. By the time we reached our destination, Turtle Bread, the ice was visibly accumulating. Inside the warm bakery/deli, we were cozy, surrounded by fresh-from-the-oven loaves and inhaling warm, humid, yeast-scented air. We talked and laughed as we leisurely ate our salads and homemade chicken pot pies. Facing the windows all along the front of the cafe, I saw the ice turn to big, fat snowflakes which quickly blanketed everything in quiet white. I watched as passersby exhibited varying reactions to the snow, some hunched up inside their winter parkas looking grim and others displaying childlike exuberance and joy.

The remainder of our lazy Sunday flowed from there: browsing the shops in Uptown, Kowalski’s for pizza toppings (we bought fresh pizza dough at Turtle Bread), back to Mike’s for an evening of public television (of course, Downton Abbey!) and fresh food, topped off by a viewing of “The Mexican.” Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt – how can you go wrong?

Honestly, not one minute was “productive” (well, Mike did some laundry), and not one moment was spent worrying about what was not getting done. I had let it all go. As a result, I have rarely passed a day that more perfectly resonated with what I needed from it.

Normally, at this point in one of my posts I would get all academic, sharing the insights I’ve received from a variety of sources addressing exactly this instance. How to let go, how to relax, why I can’t let go, decision-fatigue, blah-dee-blah-blah. But this time, just this once, I want to let the experience speak for itself: the paradox of how an ice storm could suffuse me with so much calm warmth.

Mysteries, Yes
 
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.~ Mary Oliver ~(Evidence)

Taking a Flying Leap

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“You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice he was running on nothing but thin air?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he says. “I always used to wonder what would have happened if he’d never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we’re all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we’re walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn’t look down, we could make it to the other side…”

–Jonathan Tropper,The Book of Joe

I was sitting at my dining room table, trying to decide what to share in today’s post. My recent reflections have been, indeed, reflections of my state of mind – serious, heavy, full of the weighty feel of winter. I was attempting to think of something to say today that would lighten the mood a bit, but I was coming up empty-handed.

Then, I happened to look up and see the little painting (in the photo above) that my sister, Gwen, gave me for Christmas. When I got home from the holidays in New Mexico, I put the painting in the little niche in my dining room, where it resides with angels and saints, a diminutive ceramic creche, a glass charm against the evil eye. And I promptly stopped noticing it until now.

The woman silhouetted in the painting is leaping – with abandon and joy, it seems — across a chasm. She is looking ahead, at her goal, not down at what is or is not currently beneath her feet. Does she know, I wonder, what lies ahead? I doubt it – it seems clear that this is a leap of faith. Faith that she’ll land safely on the other side. Faith that the choice to leap was the right one. Faith that the time for leaping had arrived. And faith that, whatever awaits on the far side of the chasm, will be worth facing and taking the leap.

Faith is what I’ve been forgetting to cultivate in this dark winter. And in so doing, a joyful spirit is what I’ve imprisoned in anxiety and fear. The overwhelming to-do list I’ve written with my obsessive thinking lacks both faith and joy – I have been thinking of everything as something I have to do (even time with loved ones has been relegated to the status of “onerous chores”) rather than as something I choose to do – or better, as something I am privileged to do.

I am reminded of what Brene Brown says in The Gifts of Imperfection about resilience: “Feelings of hopelessness, fear, blame, pain, discomfort, vulnerability, and disconnection sabotage resilience. The only experience that seems broad and fierce enough to combat a list like that is the belief that we’re all in this together and that something greater than us has the capacity to bring love and compassion into our lives.” (my emphasis)

So here’s to cultivating resilience: to leaping forward without looking down, to releasing a joyful spirit from the gloom of winter, to celebrating connection, and to actively practicing faith.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Today begins six weeks in which I will be incredibly busy. I have done what I could to prepare for it, though it wasn’t enough. After all, the past few weeks have been busy in their own right! When I start to feel pressure from the things I know are on the horizon, I have a tendency to give anxiety free-reign. And as I feel more anxious, I grow less patient, less able to take minor setbacks in stride. As anxiety reaches fever pitch, I begin to resent the conditions in which I find myself – as if I didn’t have a hand in creating them.

Because a lot, though not all, of what I will be doing in this busy period is work related, I will have a tendency to blame my job for the outcomes of my anxiety – if I snap at someone, if I drop the ball and let a friend down, if I miss an appointment. So my challenge is to remain centered and on task in my own life, and to not allow myself to abdicate responsibility for my actions.

Parker Palmer, my go-to guy, says this, in A Hidden Wholeness:

“The notion that we cannot have what we genuinely need is a culturally induced illusion that keeps us mired in the madness of business as usual. But illusions are made to be broken. Am I busy? Of course I am. Am I too busy to live my own life? Only if I value it so little that I am willing to surrender it…”

So, heading into Monday, I am pausing to take a deep breath. The next weeks are a marathon, not a sprint, so I need to pace myself and remember what I truly value!

Next Generation

Today, I spent two hours interviewing high school seniors who were competing for top scholarships at the university I work for. Prior to meeting them, I had a chance to review lists of the activities in which they have been involved throughout the four years of high school. Each young person’s list was more than a page in length, meaning that the activities for each numbered in the high teens through the twenties. Band, sports, community service, church-sponsored activities, peer mentoring. The lists were impressive.

However, when asked to tell us about an issue in her community or the world about which she felt passionate, one student told us that she is concerned about how stressed high school students are these days. They have pressures from family, from friends, from teachers, the community and the colleges competing for their enrollment. She felt that more attention should be given to helping students develop a sense of self-worth and self-determination, rather than so much effort expended in making them marketable.

According to the National Survey of Freshmen, the entering college class of 2010 is the least emotionally healthy class ever. And for the first time, anxiety has overtaken depression as the leading mental health issue reported by students.

Taken together, the student’s words and the survey results give me pause to reconsider the activity lists submitted to us. Were they impressive? Or an example of our society’s desire to put form ahead of substance?

These days, students arrive on the steps of our institutions of higher learning carrying some pretty heavy baggage (both literally and figuratively). They come with plenty of self-focus but very little self-knowledge; having dabbled in many things, often without developing true passion for any one activity; expecting to face difficulties, but with very little resilience when problems arise. Perhaps the root of this is the very idea that our role as the adults in their world is to help them see themselves as a commodity to be groomed for the market – whether that is the college scholarship market or the job market.

Working with college students has been both my career and my vocation. I am not afraid that today’s young people are any more likely to screw up the world than previous generations. I am, however, very concerned that we are likely to screw them up in lasting ways. I recently listened to a TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! in which he talks about the absurdity of three year olds being interviewed for pre-school. He goes on to make a case for a revolution in education, as opposed to reform. I believe that if such a revolution is to occur, there will need to be a concurrent revolution in the way parents and communities talk about and model what it means to be a mature human being. Otherwise, our adolescents will continue to be stressed, and we will never move beyond this Age of Anxiety in which we are living.