Sylvia's Journal

Nearly two months after my last few entries, a dream drew me back to my diary. It was about worries. Worries to not be able to check in for a flight to Wuhan – of all places – because I hadn’t planned for an airport farewell. That farewell (to whom and with whom got lost in the wake up) had taken more time than anticipated. For reasons unclear now, I either had not looked at my planner, or forgotten the trip altogether, I realized within an hour of the scheduled departure of my flight to Wuhan that I still needed to collect my travel documents and suitcase from my home. Trying to flag down taxi cabs that could get me from the airport in Paris to my childhood home (in the Netherlands) in a totally unreasonable time filled me with worry until I met an old and always cheerful friend from college who said, “Why don’t you relax and take the next flight to Wuhan?”

Oh how right she was, worry is such a waste of time. I am listening to a lovely little book (Into the Magic Shop) written by a neurosurgeon (James R. Doty) on what he learned, as a young child, from a remarkable meditation teacher who had taken him under her wing inside a stripmall Magic Shop. “Worry is a waste to time,’ she remarked to the to the young man, who was at that time living a rather bleak existence in a bleak part of a bleak town, barely a teenager. Or, as I learned in Nigeria, decades ago, “when you worry, you go die; when you don’t worry you go die. So why worry?”

Worry consumes enormous amounts of energy, shallows our breathing, reduces our peripheral vision, releases more cortisol into our body than we need, which then weakens our immune system, etc. In short, worry is bad for us. I think I have been worrying about so many things for a full year now (COVID, elections, violence, vaccines) that extricating myself from this state of mind has been a big challenge for way too long.

On a more intimate level, worrying has also been about ruminating about past decisions and anticipating that bad stuff will happen in the future. This is why I have made a commitment at getting better at meditation, even if it is only 20 minutes each day. I am still very inexperienced in my meditation journey, but with a year of daily practice under my belt, I am getting just a little better at fighting the worry Ninja.

From July till December, our ‘aging-in-place’ project has filled me with worries (forward and backward), what with all the decisions (smart and not so smart in hindsight), and the oodles of money involved. Now, actually aging in our new place, downstairs, I let that worry Ninja go, but another one has appeared.  A new project has started next door after one of our neighbors of 50 years died and his housemate vacated the premises a month ago, leaving us with a considerable mess to clean up. There are once again decisions to make on what to spend money on and what not, the color of the walls to be painted, the furnishing of the place.

With our grandchildren’s homeschooling likely to go on until the end of this school year, and their parents often at wits’ end on how to manage this colossal challenge, we invited them to come and live next door whenever and for as long as they wanted until the end of the school year. That way we can look after the kids when their parents cannot.

I keep getting sucked back into the energy-draining ruminating and anticipating routines, wishing backwards and forward, that get in the way of being in the here and now. I am calling on all the wisdom from the West and the East to counter that tendency: Pilates on Monday, Yoga on Tuesday and Tai Chi on Thursday. And in the meantime, we are still in the depth of winter and cannot have the social contacts that usually help us get through this endless winter.