Ice Daggers as Anxiety
Cure
(or “shiver me
timbers it’s fucking cold out!”)
By Casey Douglass
My heart was doing the
thing it does when I start to get anxious and stressed. Often, I can
sit with it and mindfully watch it settle again, but yesterday it
felt like it was growing into something approaching a “state”. I
found myself checking something inconsequential on my phone over and
over and realised I needed to break that state. Lacking the patience
to sit with it, I swiftly decided to go for a short walk in the
biting wind. I pondered how well to wrap up against the elements but,
maverick that I am, purposefully left my gloves off. I did this even
hearing dad moaning about how cold it was when he came in earlier,
rubbing his hands and eager to get them around a cup of coffee. I
decided that I was going to focus on the cold in my hands as a
pattern breaker. I know, hardcore doesn’t come close to describing
me.
The wind hit me like a
punch in the face, but the sunlight kissed it better again. Leaves
flew as birds hunkered down in the bushes, an ironic exchanging of
position. My hands felt the paradoxically hot-feeling bite of the
cold, my fingers bending slightly as if trying to curl into the digit
approximation of the foetal position. I’m not sure what my balls
were doing, but I’d imagine if they had been exposed, I would have
needed a search party to find them again once they’d retreated.
While I didn’t solely focus on my hands, there were just some parts
of my body that I overlooked. Maybe next time...
I paid mindful
attention to the sensation of cold, the way it throbbed and ached in
my hands, shivers racking my body, my teeth chattering and my torso
tingling with pins and needles. I knew that it wouldn’t take long
for the carbon dioxide of muscle use to build up and heat me from the
inside, but my god it felt like ages. The sunlight was a milky
yellow, the orb hanging low in the sky like a pervert trying to look
up a short skirt. It was warming, but there were plenty of shadows to
scupper its view. I found myself anticipating each strip of glowing
luke-warmth as it splayed across my path. I tried to take a more
accepting stance by paying attention to my attachment to the warmth,
and my aversion to the cold bleak darkness of the shadows; it was
as interesting as it was painful.
It wasn’t a long
walk, but by the time I had heated up a little and arrived back home,
that pattern or mode switch that I was half-hoping for seemed to have
happened. I was dog tired though, which brings about other problems,
a higher propensity for anxiety not the least of them. Much like my
occasional walk, you nearly always come back to where you started
when you try to get away from things, or even change them a little.
That being said, I quite enjoyed having my mind on sensations that
weren’t linked to stress and anxiety for awhile, and I even managed
to turn it into something to write about on a day where I am
struggling again. It seems to be the walk that just keeps on giving.
Thanks for reading.
