Loosening the Laces

A year and a half after a semi-forced retirement, I find myself still with a working (and paid off) car, still mostly making it on social security and a part time off the books job, still mostly healthy and within a month or two of having the wretched credit cards down to a zero balance.   The dogs and cats are healthy and happy, I’m able to get out and hear my music and I’ve begun actually selling some of my photographs.  Even the sad light and lengthening October shadows that have brought on a free floating depression each fall for most of my life seem less powerful.  And yet, despite it all, a part of me is still waiting for it to crash around me.  As my cousin tells me, like her, I’m waiting for the other shoe – the heavy, mud crusted one – to fall.   I have to remind myself constantly not to loosen its laces.   How strange that we are so often our own worst enemies.

You might think that since none of the catastrophes I worried about and lost sleep over have come to pass, that since I stressed and scared myself silly for absolutely nothing, it might be time to take a second look at how I handle life's little ups and downs.  You might think that I'd have learned a little something about faith or manufacturing trouble or imagining the worst or simply staying in the day.

Nope.

No disasters hanging on the horizon just means I get to invent some new ones.

Not all the time, of course, that would make a person certifiable.  But enough of the time that I scold myself on a pretty regular basis for toxic thinking and then have to endure a second scolding for beating myself up about it.  As the old blues saying goes, can't win for losing.

I'd like to think that worry just follows me like a little gray rain cloud.  Truth is, I keep it on a short leash and counter it with each and every unexpected bright day.  It's kind of like what a friend recently posted about optimism - one step forward and two steps back isn't failure, it's the cha cha - and besides, as another sunshiny friend of mine was quick to point out, who's to say that when the other shoe does drop, it won't be filled with rainbows?