This is how I see it

Every day I have choice to make. Happy. Not happy. The happiness balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly.

Today was one of those “not do it so well” days. My Monday got turned round like the weather and I found myself in the linger of thoughts of all the things I haven’t done with my life, should already have done with my life, and all the in-between mud and sling scenarios.

When that happens and I don’t let it go, like I’ve been taught so many times in the books I read on recovery, I’m raw for the game and it pushes me under like the kid in the swimming pool did when I was nine. 

That little bully, who was a stranger in a pool on a camping trip I took with my parents, pushed me under where I gulped panic water and thought I was going to drown. It happened in the deep end and I couldn’t touch bottom.

“Should’ a could’ a” thoughts don’t nail me to terror like that kid did, yet the nasty duo sure can set me back in my pursuit of an even keeled attitude to the day—and these days, as the temperature leaps from a gorgeously deliriously warm Sunday to the bowels of a blizzard by this Monday night—an even keeled attitude is, to say the least, a paramount check mark on my optimistic albeit warped sense of reality and what I pray is the beginnings of a bloomy and green fourth month of 2014.

Last week I wrote about my impending house renovation and how it’s drying out my eye sockets pouring over the meat and potatoes of the matter.

It’s still keeping me up at night, or at least keeping me from drifting off as I usually do upon laying my head on the pillow. Instead of slipping into unconsciousness I do math tables and measurements and draw up lists of the pros and cons of entering the gates of this project. Then I fall asleep and find myself inside the gates and I can’t get out!

Yes, yes. Leave it to me to make a mountain out of a molehill.

But here’s the thing. This is how I see it. I figured out where it comes from—all this apprehension, second-guessing, failure to launch bog of thinking that I inevitably find myself mired in.

I haven’t made any big decisions like this in my life for more than two years. I stayed far away from that on purpose—protected myself from having to so that I could keep the outcomes close, and control of them closer. Letting go is hard.

But here’s the thing. When I was nine, suddenly I was in the deep end and I couldn’t touch bottom, and yet upon sinking I fought against my fear and swam for the side. 

The mind can be just as big a bully to progress as a human being can be to his fellow man.

Swim on; like a fish.