I am anxious.

Who knows why, I stopped wondering about the weird place that is my mind a long time ago and consider myself more of a passenger aboard this ship of a body that is often sailed through dangerous waters on a journey God knows where.

Mostly I attend to my duties and try to stay out of trouble and below deck but once and awhile I wonder about the trip.

I am anxious.

The problem with anxiety is that it could be anything, a tad imbalance in the grey matter or a poor breakfast. When you try to puzzle out what the source might be it requires you to journey into all the potentially worrisome things going on in your life and this only feeds the anxiety.

Normally I am a fairly relaxed sort. One that does not dwell too long on the darker things if I can help it. One that dismisses worries as phantoms in the night that will be blown away in the winds of dawn.

Still there are things that can lead to anxiety after 44 years of learning to be alive.

I have two fantastic jobs that keep me more than busy – full time working at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre as acting executive director and part time writing editorials for the local weekly The Winkler Morden Voice. Both of these things are fulfilling. The people I work with at the museum are amazing and talented. The place itself has endless potential and requires me to exert all of my skill (such as it is) in various areas of management, business development and marketing.

The editorial job is pretty sweet as well. I love to write. I write. Sometimes I feel as if it is coffee and writing that keep me alive.

So why the anxiety?

The future.

It is the true undiscovered country…not death as Shakespeare said (although certainly death is a part of the future so perhaps it deserves to be a province in the undiscovered country).

Sometimes when I ponder my future fortunes I begin to understand why people tend to move their lives into the past. The past is comfortable and safe and one can be selective about it. There is no change. It is reliable.

I saw my grandmother for the first time in seven years last week. I would see her more often but the trips are costly. It was good to see her but she has moved securely into the past and taken up residence. She has built a stone fortress of the past and sits by the fire of old memories.

She is lost there.

I love my grandmother. At 90 years of age she is much as she was really. Certainly more frail but she has the same voice, the same laugh, the same eyes, she can hold a conversation fluently, lucidly and this makes me happy. But she has no need for the present any more. It, and those in it, have been lost to her in favour of her history. Her story.

I dread the past. The past is dead. I am not. I value it for lessons only but do not want to live there. I am a person of the present…this is where I am…the present is the only real thing in the world. The future is simply a possibility.

I am anxious.

The possibilities for the future are impacted by the present. My present is filled with much that I wish to bring with me as I move forward…my children, my loves. Matt and Caleb and Itsy, all warriors of a strength unique to each. I have an unhealthy pride for them that is unquenchable. They travel with me and to a degree because of me. I am responsible for them and this binds us forever together…some reason to be anxious maybe?

Ahhh it goes away now. I feel it diminishing like a healing wound or a swelling reduced with ice…writing is like a lance to the variety of boils that can come my way.

It is nice to have this therapy. It keeps me from becoming one of the walking dead…you know them – they hate everybody and everything and life is burden which was thrust unwillingly upon them…I cannot imagine bearing up under the constant strain of such a perspective…it wearies me just thinking about it and makes me sad.