It’s the start of the new year. Another year of anxiety stretches before me. It’s a strange thing how my life has become a day-in-day-out struggle with worry.
Of course, worry is not all that stretches before me. If I try, if I just try, I will hear and see and experience more than worry. If I try, if only I try, I will remember that a step out the door — front or back — is all that’s required to enter a different world, perhaps not a better world, or an easier world, but a different world. If I try, if I simply try, I will know that what’s in my head — the circling thoughts, the what ifs, the overthinking cautions — is not all that is.
Sitting at my desk in the waning afternoon light, I am certain that time is too short and danger lurks around unseen corners; I cannot imagine a day, a moment, or a breath that will not offer the same…but this morning when I strapped on my snowshoes and hiked across the field to the shrubline, I experienced otherness. The sun was bright, air cold, and my breath labored as I worked my way through the drifts. By the time the sharptail grouse flew up from their tangled shelter, I was no longer in the world of my circling thoughts. I was engaged in a different world.
Pennington Co Sect: 24 