Leaning In

Sometimes the fear creeps in like a cold stabbing to the heart. Other times, it's more a dull feeling of dread, a surety that something isn't quite right. I've been told the bouts of panic over the well being of loved ones springs from a form of PTSD.  This makes sense to me, on some level, as our family and I personally have experienced sudden loss on more than one occasion. One afternoon, I was hugging my Dad after spending a fun day with him, telling him I loved him before heading back to my apartment by the University. The next morning, I was waking up to the phone call nobody wants to receive- there'd been an accident. A month later, every plan I'd made to spend more time with my Dad that summer, after a hectic school year with very few open spaces for down time, was forever shattered. One morning, I was in my apartment in Boston. I'd just pulled some muffins from the oven, sticky, sweet, and hot. The phone rang, my cousin, far too young to be gone, had been in a wreck.  There were no more chances to tell him that I understood him more than he could know. It was just over. One day, I walked into the print shop I worked at in Allston, Massachusetts, after the usual morning T ride from the Fenway.  Our shop manager, who was usually the first to arrive, was missing. People were speaking in hushed tones about a tragedy...shortly thereafter we found out our manager and friend had killed himself. My mind raced back to a conversation we'd had just days before while running a press together. He'd just been talking about proposing to his girlfriend. Had she said "no"? How did we go from heartfelt, life affirming conversation over freshly printed t shirts, to that last, anguished moment he spent in the late hours of the night in his little Cambridge apartment? 

Life throws us curves. Sometimes, it throws us grenades. These incidences and others have brought me to a hard realization that there isn't always "one more day" to make that phone call, pay that visit, or "get things right".  They've brought me to a constant feeling of impermanence, and a sadness under the surface of loss to come. I hate this feeling, because sometimes I feel it prevents me from living with full joy in the happier moments, in the now. When you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, you don't have both of your feet firmly planted right where you are. The only place I know to go with this is to divinity. Nothing makes sense to me unless I go there; there is only impending doom and a paralyzingly fear of the horrors to come. I wish I could say I'm being over dramatic, but this is the reality I experience every day. It's not my every waking moment, but it's the shadow lurking in the corners of my daily journey. 

I have been gifted with a wonderful sense of intuition. Oftentimes, I will know certain things before they happen, or I will get inklings of things to come, like when I was thinking about a name one morning, considering that if I'd ever had another baby girl I would have given that name to her. The next day, my Mom called to tell me that my sister and her hubby were going to be blessed with a baby girl. They were naming her that very name I'd pondered on the previous morning over coffee. One could say this was one hell of a coincidence, but the name in question is not a common one, so I'd have to disagree.  I've experienced inner stirrings of unease over certain people only to find out later that they'd been sick; I once had a vision that a family member had collapsed, only to discover the next day that she'd passed out in a subway on the way home from work the day before (she was okay, after a nasty bought with a virus). The trouble with this intuition is that sometimes my mind will tell me things are wrong that aren't, sending me into panic. I've learned to take a moment when this type of situation occurs, to use the tricks I've learned to separate what is real from what is only fear.  The intuitive feelings I get are subtly different from the messages of doom my mind will sometimes broadcast, and breathing through the discomfort is necessary in order to discern what's really going on. I believe we're connected to our loved ones on a spiritual level and I envision a golden or a silver cord that joins me to a particular person when I'm feeling fearful with regard to their well being. In reaching out on this level, I'm usually able to get a better grasp of what is going on, and this has helped me to ease out of panic attacks.  It's difficult to explain this process; I only know that it works for me and has offered me a layer of peace in my day to day life.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write about this today. Maybe there are other people out there going through the same struggle. Life is going to do what it does. We can control only how we handle what comes along. Loving others means opening ourselves up to being vulnerable, but I wouldn't have it any other way.