Anxiety and Other Things.
Anxiety has a way of getting ahead of us - you can be making coffee, answering an email, standing in line at the grocery store, while your mind is somewhere in the future. If you’ve lived with anxiety long enough, it can stay like a low hum that you barely notice; other times, your breathing goes shallow, and your body starts preparing for something that isn't actually happening. Nothing outside the body has shifted; you're still standing in the same line, holding the same basket, concerned about when the other shoe may drop.
Have you noticed it doesn't even need a real event to work with? Maybe it's a flight tomorrow, and you could've flown a hundred times, know exactly what turbulence is and isn't, and still find yourself lying in bed doing math about how early is early enough for the airport, replaying the sound planes make right after takeoff like this is finally the flight where it means something. The plane hasn't gone anywhere, and neither have you; yet you're already there, bracing.
Relationships give us plenty to work with, too. You can love someone, be happy with them, and still catch yourself wondering whether he or she is the right one, as though there's some point in a relationship when you're supposed to become certain about a future neither of you has lived yet.
Then there's the doctor's appointment you've known about for weeks but somehow become anxious about the night before. A twinge you'd normally ignore gets your full attention; you type it into a search bar you swore you wouldn't open again, and twenty minutes later you've diagnosed yourself with three things the doctor hasn't even walked in to rule out.
Money can do the same thing with a job interview you took that hasn't called yet. You're waiting to hear about the offer, doing the math with money you don't have, then doing entirely different math in case it doesn't come at all. You don’t know anything more than you did before, and still you're running two versions of what Friday looks like side by side, the one where the offer comes and the one where it doesn't, as if thinking hard enough about both versions could somehow prepare you for either.
Meanwhile, everything in the present moment is exactly where it was five minutes ago - you're still standing in the grocery store, or packing the suitcase, waiting for the doctor to walk through the door or the email to arrive, or lying next to someone you love and wondering about a future neither of you can know. And all the while none of what you're thinking about is happening right now, even though your body has been responding as if it is.
Knowing all of this doesn't tell you how the flight will go, what the doctor will say, whether the job will come through, or who you'll be sleeping next to ten years from now. And it won’t answer the question anxiety was trying so hard to answer in the first place. It only puts you back where the answer hasn't arrived yet, which, inconveniently, is where all of the magic of life happens.
