I swear I should have been a Native American! I have suffered from anxiety my whole life. I have always been able to get myself worked up into a frenzy about the possibility of something bad happening. Now I know that the answer to that is to not know what is coming!
Take last week. I was in my room at Jean's house sorting through my clothes. The weather had been dreary and misty all day. Jean and I were going to go out to dinner. Since I no longer watch TV I really don't know what is going on at any given moment. Now flash back only a couple of years. . . . I am constantly checking the weather and the radar to see if any storms are coming. Because, you see, if there are storms coming, then maybe they will kill me. A perfect excuse to reduce myself to a sniveling, pathetic fraidy-cat. But I've never even been close to being in a life-threatening storm. Okay. . so back at Jean's. Suddenly I notice that the rain is coming down in sheets outside. It's raining sideways! And I'm thinking, "Well, I'm glad we haven't left for dinner yet!" And I continue to sort clothes. Before too long the rain has passed and we proceed with our plans. The next day my sister calls to ask if I'm all right. "And why wouldn't I be?" I answer. Well, she says, she has been watching the stories about the tornadoes that went through our area. Huh? Then I realized that the sudden burst of rain must have been the tail end of a system that spawned a couple of tornadoes. I had no idea that weather was coming, so I didn't have any reason to be anxious. Just like the Native Americans. They didn't know when a hurricane was coming. There was no Al Roker in a slicker giving them minute by minute details of the potential carnage. They just weathered any storm as it came. I should have been a Native American.
So today is my big flight to Indianapolis. I say big because in my life any flight is big. But I have been doing a great job in the past weeks since making the plane reservations, of carefully steering my thoughts away from my default setting of visions of complete and utter destruction via airplane. And then this morning before leaving I checked the Indianapolis weather. Uh-oh. High wind advisory for the middle of the day. . . like the time I would be flying. YIKES! Visions of planes being tumbled into the dirt after being blasted by a 40 mph wind blast come quickly to my awareness. I went to the airport just a bit edgy. But I got on that plane. I let them take away my half full tube of Tom's of Maine toothpaste because it was too big for carry-on. I let them toss my half consumed bottle of water. I boldly got on that plane and just determined that whatever happened around Indianapolis was just going to have to happen. I channeled Charisma Dubois, my son Casey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dave, and several members of the Choral Arts Society who seem to spend about half their lives on planes. Well, as it happens, it was a relatively smooth trip. Only an hour and 20 minutes. When the captain came on and said it would be a bumpy descent and landing, I took a deep breath. But it really wasn't and it was a perfect landing. It is FREEZING cold in Indy. And I would say there is a breeze but nothing dramatic.
So I landed safely. I would liken this experience to a colonoscopy. The reality was not even remotely on the level of the dreaded anticipation. I really should not know about things in advance. I would be much happier.
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