When Nothing Awakens Us to Something

Anxiety is such a quiet and unassuming nemesis, manifesting itself as if it weren’t even there. When we think we have a handle on it, up it pops to say “Yoo-hoo, here I am!”

When all’s not right at home-base, we’re forgiven for concern; intuitive creatures given to dilemmas are we.

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Lord, why is it so that ‘this’ can awaken,

The sense of fright within that’s hardly even there?

A stimulus that resembles a shop-front break-in,

Warrants the justice that awakens with a blank-held stare.

Reminders plunder the basis of reason,

Come back to them we must each and every time,

For without logic we clamour for a season,

No matter how we conquest by manner or rhyme.

Anxiety’s treason is a hard-understood blight,

Leaving souls out to dry – indiscriminately so,

Without cause to even remotely suggest flight,

Stammers the predilection for the person to grow.

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How do we sympathise with such an invisible enemy—one that the ‘sensible’ believer amongst us doesn’t even validate (revealing them to be a sort of false teacher)?

There is no easy answer to anxiety—the predilection to consumed thought, or maybe the presence of shy awkwardness, or a physical symptom or the like.

Halting Anxiety’s Stammering Flow

Even though logic and reason appear quite forlorn in the presence of anxiety, they still bode us well in combating it.

We go without defence when we fight anxiety without these portents of the sound mind. We must come back to sense and good commonly-held rationale, and often. It needs to become a trained instinct.

This is often how the minutes are managed, however fatiguing that process can be.

The final hurdle is empathy—oh, and how so timely!

The Importance of Empathy

The more confusing states of being get, the more people get to thinking they might be mad. It’s ironic that a sense of reason prevails to get them to this place of self-assessment.

What a wondrous skill it is to develop empathy with ourselves... that is, to take our problems seriously enough, but also be able to listen to and understand the reverberant spirit.

This is a skill worth mastering.

At its core it is self-care for self-preservation, and beyond it, deeper still, is the love of God known within by the soul that simply stands tranquil enough to trust.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.