Anxiety and Hope

Over the weekend, I was completely overwhelmed with anxiety.  I worried that my incisions were not healing properly, and there would be other complications.  But mostly I worried that it would be painful to have the drainage tube removed.  I have no idea how I ever got this idea in my head, but it was there.  I did not want to ask anyone – because I was afraid they would confirm my fear. 

All of this is somewhat understandable because there have been a number of procedures along the way that have been far more uncomfortable than I was expecting.  For example, the morning after my surgery, it took two technicians and multiple tries to get a blood sample from my right arm.  Apparently along with her migraine headaches I also inherited my mother’s “rolling veins.”

So going to see my surgeon on Monday morning, I was totally on edge.  I really, really like this surgeon.  She is a calm, no nonsense, and currently immensely pregnant woman with a pierced nose and multiply pierced ears.  She told me everything was healing very well and that generally people thought it felt kind of “weird” when the drainage tube was removed but it was not usually uncomfortable. 

And, then it was out and over – and I never felt a thing.  Seriously, it is way more painful to remove a band-aid.

Then I felt silly, and that I had wasted way too much of a perfectly fine weekend being stressed about this.  Floating through my head was a quote that I first heard attributed to Corrie ten Boom, an incredibly brave Dutch woman, who along with her father helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust, and later wrote a book about it called The Hiding Place.  “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

Recently, I have come across a variation of this quote attributed to 19^th Century influential British Baptist preacher named Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who wrote “Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.”

I don’t really care who said it first - I just like the idea.  The problem is I have no idea how to embody it.  Writer Anaïs Nin described anxiety as “love's greatest killer.  It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you.  You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”  Feeling like I am “strangled with panic” – is a good description of how I feel when anxiety takes over.

So I turn to the tools I have.  I write. I meditate.  I escape with hours of bad network television.  I am trying to rewire the default setting on my expectations. 

But in that re-write, I don’t want to dial back hope, which perhaps makes me a challenger to Mary Pipher, who claims to be the “worst Buddhist in the World.”

Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist Monk, whose work I admire a great deal, writes, “Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.”

Googling around on the word hope I came up with lots of interesting perspectives.  Sometimes it is described as a feeling, sometimes as an expectation.  The one that was the most interesting to me was the fact that the Hebrew word “yachal” which means “trust,” is sometimes translated as hope.  I guess it is all of those things, a feeling, an expectation and an intuitive sense of trust that things will get better. 

I often tell my students there are no “shoulds” or “should nots” where feelings are concerned.  What you feel you feel.  And today, on this first day of spring (vernal equinox) I am frustrated that the wind chill was -11 this morning and there is still snow in the yard.  But I do not feel anxious and I continue to feel hopeful.  I am good with all that.