⚡NEW⚡ For a more complete experience click on NOTES to access the ever changing interactive feature of the Road Ahead. (You can also find it at the top of the Homepage)
Below is a reading from my book THE OTHER ROAD AHEAD followed by a comment inspired by the selection.👇
I suffer from spells of anxiety that come on like a tropical storm across the Everglades. One minute a tranquil buttermilk sky then quietly ever so quietly angry purple clouds appear on the horizon almost imperceptibly tarnishing the sunny day until the winds pick up and the rain hammers down in a typhoon like torrent. Rain so hard you can't see across the street, in flowing curtains dancing across my view mesmerizing me into a feeling of fear and disbelief.
Anxiety visits me in stormy gusts buffeting my well being until it disappears, swept up in the winds of the storm battering my tortured mind. Sometimes the storm is not as dramatic, drifting in like a bleak cloud of fog coming in from the Gulf. Slowly creeping closer until the water and the beach vanish into a gray porridge. Yet no matter the form it takes the results are the same, my mood deteriorates into a pool of fears and regrets. I am scared of something someone somewhere hiding at the edge of my thoughts calling my name like the bugle of battle to come into this deep cistern of regrets...or what? I don't know.
Often the storm of anxiety is not centered on anything I can point out quickly. Instead it is some lingering problem or an unresolved conflict that continues to nag at me even though I am not fully aware of its name. Perhaps it is the evil people who think they can rule the world from a keyboard or an army of autonomous robots frolicking about the world with ray-guns and automatic weapons leveling everything into rubble spewing forth from my phone screen or taunting me with vicious fantasies.
Or maybe it is nothing real or imagined just a strange undigested thought caught sideways in an injured brain cell left over from a childhood trauma. Sometimes called undifferentiated anxiety in other words a soup of sad twisted thoughts without titles or substance taking over in times of stress challenging my mood and sending my well being to sit in the corner with a dunce cap on until I can somehow retrieve it from this punishment.
That is where this reading selection arrives on the page several years ago on a cold night while at my desk trying to squeeze another bit of writing out of a road weary mind sodden with worry and frustration. It occurred to me that the only way out of these bouts of self-indulgent misery was seeking help from somewhere outside the world that has caused these thoughts to fester and grow on this night while home and in between art shows which serves as nurseries for anxious moments.
I'm not really a religious person in the sense of regular church going or divining wisdom from random verses in the Bible. Someday I will relate my checkered experiences with churches (although a dedicated search engine aficionado may be able to find earlier writings on the subject) and I will publish another essay on the subject yet for now things being as they are it is not much help for me to rehash this subject except to say that ultimately in the case of our anxious world prayer seemed the only viable avenue to achieve some control over a mind cloaked in frightful shadows. Not a particularly new or innovative solution to the mental anguish I experience with the penumbra of insoluble problems but an effective antidote for the poison of self inflicted fears occasionally draining out of my mind.
One of a handful in the book I wrote the September first selection is a prayer asking for calm with the understanding that solutions to my anxiety will come when I am ready to accept the answers. Until then I must be patient.
Please leave a contribution for the author 👇 (This is a very secure site and the people who operate this Tip Jar are helpful and receive only a small fee for their service)
BOOK CAN BE PURCHASED BELOW
You get the new Homepage and many more features including NOTES by clicking below 👇