The Beautiful Answer

And Away We Go

When you’re approaching a big deadline in life, you can go two ways, I’ve found. One is to ball up into the fetal position and rock bak and forth in bed, wondering why you ever had the idea to write that book, or stage that play, or record that song. The other is to try your best to surf the energy of the moment, bypassing any crazy things like sleep or, in many moments, food and proper hydration. 

The latter brings about better balance, and maybe stronger mental health. The former results in, well, better rest, I suppose, as long as you can sleep while fetal. The reason I’m thinking about this, I’m sure has to do with the fact that I have a book coming out in 9 days. I’m not scared. Hell, I’ve been in this position two other times. I’m not exactly blase, either. That just smacks of a kind of arrogance I hope I never feel. I’m somewhere in the middle, even though there are times when the gravity of this moment of my life sneaks up on my and pounds me down to the ground.

It’s in those moments that I find the best stuff to work with. Today I found a morsel of fear connected all the way back to high school, and released that shit for good. I found a pocket of anticipation, and a wee bit of anxiety and, yes, even some anger that had been held back for so long I couldn’t even trace it back to its source. Gone, gone and gone. Thanks for playing.  Don’t need you anymore. 

Releasing all this old stuff in preparation for my book launch was so fun I was releasing negative thought patterns on the treadmill, and kicking old beliefs to the curb in Trader Joe’s. And even when a woman almost ran over my foot with her shopping cart, I was able to laugh and get out of the way, thanking whatever force gave me these reflexes and this indelibly powerful will to live. Not just live. Thrive. 

On Anxiety and the Discontents

You know those people that no one wants to be around, and yet somehow they’re everywhere? I like to call them the Negatives, because no matter what you say, they always find a way to make things not work out? They love to rain on parades, especially if they’re marching in them, and to find a million and one reasons why It’ll Never Work Out. I actually find myself becoming sunnier and sunnier around these folks, until I’m exhausted from trying to balance out their darkness. 

Anxiety has a way of doing this to people. From our distinctly American way of seeing the news (fear), the economy (more fear) and all the big things of life like health issues, family, retirement and Social Security (major uncertainty there), we aren’t really trained to deal with the stuff we can’t see, feel, control or quantify. Instead, we’re conditioned to keep fearing more, so we drive the financial and social agreements we’ve set forth. 

Without getting too conspiracy-ish about it (those are boring anyway and, yes, fear-based as all hell), it’s enough to make you want to climb the nearest mountain or join the nearest ashram. And maybe those aren’t terrible ideas. But for the rest of us who choose to remain behind, maybe there’s another way. Rather than becoming one of the anxiety-prone or the discontents, maybe we can sit with our feelings, not to disregard or even chase them away. Maybe just the act of witnessing what’s really going on inside us, without judging it or comparing it to whatever everyone else is going through, we open up a new dialogue. And if someone is listening, doesn’t that mean that we’re being seen, heard and valued for all the right reasons, at exactly the right time?