A SHORT MEDITATION ON ANXIETY

Gene is nervous about starting the ride tomorrow.  Although he hasn’t said anything about it to me, I can tell because he’s channeling his anxiety about the great unknown ahead of him into unfounded worry over everything else.  The car that just successfully made a 3,000 mile journey relatively unscathed (except for the air conditioning compressor that blew because of all the bugs we didn’t clean off the grill) is a lemon that’s falling apart before his eyes.  Someone’s going to steal his bicycle from the locked bike rack on the back of the car in broad daylight in the middle of the Legoland parking lot.

I, on the other hand, am quite vocal and open about my anxieties.

I worry that chasing this dream is going to cost us more money than we’re going to raise for Sunrise.  I worry because the perfect house/cat-sitter we finally found is suddenly unnerved about staying in our house because she got bitten by a bug in our bed on her second night there and has asked us to find someone else to take over … now that we’re on the road and have to do long distance what we nearly found impossible to do when we were home.  (Note:  I can’t really blame her, though, because I’d probably react the same way if I was in her shoes sleeping in a strange house that belonged to people I don’t really know and I got eight itchy painful bites in their bed.)  I worry that, while my husband is going to lean out from cycling 3,600 miles and be in peak shape when we get home, I’m going to become a flabby mass of unhealthiness from driving in a car all day and eating every meal in a restaurant.  I worry that my children are going to turn from caring, fun-loving, agreeable people into whiney, bored, adversaries all intent on claiming the same seat and arguing for 3,600 unbearable miles.  I worry that I haven’t given any of this enough thought, and that all my plans are built upon flimsy ideas with no real knowledge or research behind them.

But mostly I worry that we’ll both be so caught up in our anxieties and our planning that we’ll miss the amazing adventure we’re about to embark upon, and the wonderful opportunity we have to slow down and spend some unprecedented time with our children and with each other.

I guess there are times when a little worry can remind us what's most important about the things we do ... or the things we're about to do.