Taking a walk along a jetty is all about the view, isn’t it?
The sea.
The sand.
The land behind us.
The horizon ahead of us.
♦
But —
there’s the view from the jetty …
… and then there’s the view of the jetty, too.
It’s worth a look.
(tales from the birdgirl)
Sometimes, when we fear something,
the fear we anticipate experiencing is what makes us most anxious —
rather than the thing itself that we fear.
Psychologists call this ‘anticipatory anxiety’,
which, as technical terms go, is all very well.
But here’s how a man who lived more than a century ago put it:
Some of your hurts you have cured.
The sharpest still you have survived.
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived.Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-82
I’ve taken to murmuring these words to myself when I feel afraid.
People can speak in psychobabble and jargon —
or they can use timeless words.
Which do you find more healing?
The only constant in life is change …
This month, I’m participating in Mindful in May, a one-month meditation challenge to raise money to provide clean water to people in developing nations.
I know.
I know!
I don’t meditate!
But life changes.
Partly, I like the idea of helping other people whilst also helping myself.
And partly, I’m ready for change.
Lest this all sounds terribly earnest and self-involved,
let me finish by alerting you to ‘Anxiety Girl’, the comic by Natalie Dee.
No matter how anxious you’re feeling,
Anxiety Girl will make you smile.
Note:
I’d like to thank my friend Allayne for first alerting me to ‘Anxiety Girl’. She thought it might be relevant to me … and she was right.
Oh, and if you would like to support my efforts, leave a comment here and I’ll send you the link to my fundraising page.
— A mantra for the bad days —
I don’t meditate.
But here’s my bad-day mantra:
♦
I give thanks for sun:
sky:
sand:
sea:
birds:
flowers:
trees.
Just down the road from our house south of Adelaide,
in the scrub,
is my favourite place to sit and ponder:
Note:
My friend Anne has a bit of a ‘thing’ (should I say ‘penchant’, since she is French?) for taking photos of benches in lovely spots. Check out all her posts labelled ‘The Bench Series‘.