Anxious Child By Linda Stowe
I was an anxious child. Growing up on a farm, always a bit wary about the moods of ill-tempered animals, will do that to you. My mother told me that the first time I saw an airplane fly over our farm, I dropped to the ground, certain it would swoop down and carry me off. I don’t know why I was so fearful, since nothing truly bad ever happened to me. I suppose it was simply how I was wired.
Anytime we stayed after school for activities, we depended on our mother to come fetch us. She was devoted and reliable, but not punctual.
Two incidents from when I was eight to ten have stayed with me. In one, my brother and I waited for her, and when she didn’t arrive, we decided to walk home. We got completely lost but, by good fortune, came upon our Aunt Reba’s house. She gathered us up and drove us home, where we found our mother on the back porch painting a chair. When she arrived at the school and didn’t find us, she assumed the best course was to return home and wait.
A year or so later, I was outside the church after choir practice, waiting again. Everyone else had gone home, and a light rain had begun to fall. Sandy Rurode’s mother happened to pass by and saw me there alone. She took me to a nearby restaurant, gave me a slice of pie and a glass of milk, and called my mother, who drove back into town to get me—again arriving after I had already left.
To this day, waiting for someone to pick me up makes me edgy.
Wordle guess words: about, since, sandy
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Polly here.
So here is the thing. Every single one of our past experiences are being used by our busy brains to create the beliefs, expectations, and emotional patterns we use to navigate the world right on this very day. In many ways, we don’t react only to what is happening right now. We are also reacting to everything similar that happened before.
As that famous psychologist Carl Jung once said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
Whether we agree with Jung or not, there is much to be said in the idea that understanding our past helps us understand our present reactions.
Every moment in existence builds on the next. As such, we are all carrying yesterday into today. The more aware we become of those influences, the more we can understand the reasons for our reactions in life.
Our lives are here. They come from there.
