An Anxious Life

A short story I did for a creative writing class online. I wanted to put mindfulness into a story. This is what came out.

An Anxious Life

Walking in from a long day, Sandra places her bag on the table and heads to the fridge. Her daughter trails in her wake dispensing her winter attire in a haphazard way upon the kitchen floor. Sandra turns around feeling her cheeks heat up at the very sight of her daughter’s inconsiderate act. This tiny act makes her jaw clench as she mentally adds another item to her never-ending list. Before she lets the volcanic rage spew from her ready lips, she inhales deeply.  Closing her eyes, she acknowledges the legitimacy of her anger. When the words come out they are not an explosion as they so commonly were. Pausing gave Sandra the chance to respond instead of react, and she feels so much better.

It wasn’t long before that Sandra caught herself yelling at the drop of a hat.  Her churning emotions and lack of control gave her a deep sense of guilt.  Instead of patience, she evoked a short temper. She barely has any time to herself.  Her daughter had dance, her cat just hurled on the floor, or her husband piled on his own frustrations. Sandra had the overwhelming feeling that she’d suffer a heart attack and die on the spot. The ominous thought gave her a sense of relief.  She couldn’t see her blessings through her self-induced stress haze.  Stepping back Sandra tried to view what her life was about and how wonderful it is to be needed, but she’d revert to the things she couldn’t control.

This is not who she wanted to be.  Sandra needed to change.

She had found at least nine books about meditation at her local library.  Read constantly on the subject but never really practiced it.  At bed time she would try to focus on her breath like the books suggested, but then she would fall asleep and feel guilty the next morning for somehow cheating the process. 

She read in a book “…if a shark isn’t moving forward it’s dead.”  Sandra started making changes to her life forcing herself to experience things as they were not as she expected them to be.  Control was the key to it all.

Sometimes Sandra worried she would fail.  Fail what? She did not know.   Sometimes the calm settled over Sandra with ease, and she knew that things would take the course they needed to without any help from her.  Other times she’d fight to control something, anything but nothing could be grasped.  The shadows closed in around her as she battled the sea of her own turbulent mindset.

Today she broke through the surf of her agitation.  In this small moment she felt no guilt for her reaction. It wasn’t that she had controlled her emotion, but recognized it for what it was, and released it in a thoughtful way. Sandra realized trying to control an unpredictable future would only lead to frustration and pain, but to move with the current of change instead of against it is where her calm could be found.