I suppose we are putting down roots, claiming somewhere as ours. This feels exciting and scary. What is happening? Well we are hoping to buy our little rented house in the village where we feel we can breathe again and find peace. Being able to hear our own thoughts and stay in the moment, savour the experience of now, celebrating the feeling of being, just being.
I pass a house in the village with a plant just coming in to bud growing against the front wall. The house fronts the pavement and has no garden yet this plant grows in a little soil when all around is concrete, climbing the brick wall it grows taller and reaches a wider span – its growth reminds me of the value of chance, a chance in life. What can we all achieve if we are just given a chance. If the conditions are favourable what can happen, what can grow, what can flower?
I like to go out walking from the village and am finding out things about myself as I go. On one walk I feel happy and at ease – wait, what did I just say? The realisation that that was how I had felt for half-an-hour on my walk rushed at me, shocked me – so that’s how it felt to stop being anxious or fearful. This was a new feeling for me and highlighted how familiar my anxiety had become, it was now my normal default position and I felt ‘naked’ without it. I clutched at my anxious feelings as the norm, as if they had become a reassurance in themselves somehow. Was I scared if I didn’t feel like this something bad would happen, a punishment for daring to lift up my head perhaps? Had my anxious feelings become my defence, a way of being?
Yet while I ponder this I have also found out that I cannot decide to take problems out on my walk with me and do any good with them. I cannot seem to do ‘structured’ thinking when I walk – I literally do ramble! It’s as if I have taken my thoughts out on a lead when all they really want to do is wonder off. This all seems very new to me, and I realise it is! While of course I have walked before, the beautiful surroundings have previously never been so readily accessible – some kind of journey always preluded ‘the walk’. I have also never walked on my own before, I have always had a dog and walking without my beloved friend felt strange, and sad. I was getting used to it before we brought our son’s puppy home so now I wonder what the journey will be like with him alongside me. I suddenly feel anxious again.
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