Anxiety and Process
Anxiety and
Process
“Do
not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,
with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4: 6-7
Alright,
so the 13th essay came and went safely enough, even on the heels of
a full moon, but I have to freely tell, that every single time I write an essay
it starts with anxiety. It starts with the “what the hell was I thinking?” thought.
Followed quickly by a “That last essay can’t really be followed up well enough.
I probably should throw in an old essay this week” bail-out. The third
musketeer is nearly always something along the lines of “Maybe something
horribly tragic will happen in the next 24 hours, or I can pretend that it did,
and that will be my excuse to bail on the remaining [fill-in-the-blank number]
of essays remaining.” My writing process (even though I find the writing a
great joy) pretty much always starts with the very loud voices of anxiety: self-doubt
and dissent.
Someone
asked me around the 8th essay how I decide what to write. I honestly
can’t fully say how I choose or what inkling of Spirit kindles the mind into
a writable thought. The night of the poem, it just came out fully formed.
Essays from Hawaii seemed to simply happen too. Maybe I should go back to
Hawaii. It is easy to find the writing muse in Hawaii – and she seems to have
such quick humor there. Some ideas
are very easy to come by, but typically a good deal of panicking, praying,
calming, then worrying moderately less, praying, and calming a little more is
an integral part of the process for me. Mostly it is not until a few
repetitions of panic-prayer cycles have churned over, that I find the idea and
the calm that I can use to begin to write. Mostly here pours forth thoughts
I’ve already had, but the timing and the word selection, the process of the
whole thing really holds such mystery. Not unlike much of life. Why now? Why
this story? Why me? Why this word, not that word? Why this turn of phrase,
rather than another? I’m beginning to learn how integral anxiety, self-doubt,
and questioning is to my faith and to the vibrancy of the writing process. It’s
the dark, necessary “yin,” to the sparkle of trust in “yang.” It is the dark
hours of Christ’s Passion and death, cast dramatically against the glory of His
resurrection - appearing and reappearing minutely – thought-by-thought, moment-by-moment,
choice-by-choice in the small events and small prayers of my little life. It is my scientific ego’s questioning
crashing uproariously with the spirit contentedness that finds which words of
love, hope, and life, most easily flow forth. Visually, I always get an
impression of a process that looks like the fractal image above. It seems to me,
we live in the physical and spiritual repetition of patterns of life that look
(from God’s perspective) like this – formulaic repeats and variations of life
in infinite depths of size and distance. The Sovereign Mathematician can see it
all shaping up an eternity away.
Sovereign
Mathematician, let me continue to appreciate my anxieties and questions as the necessary
dark “variable” invitations to trust in your Sacred Formula {anxiety/questions
x trust} + {DIVINE LOVE x prayer/meditation} = LOVING ANSWERS will manifest. Help me remember that my questions and
concerns are merely the variables, that the problem and the mental calculations
are all Yours. Thank you for already adjusting for all my predictable positive
and negative errors. Continue to remind me that grade school math will suffice.
You do not require that I attempt to launch off into the calculus of hyperbole
(although You can handle that too, if I must). Please continue to write your
answers on my heart that I may act simply as a product of your Divine Image. Amen.
