It’s been a bad month for driving. Five hours to travel six miles. Ninety minutes for two. And then ten miles became twenty in four hours… let alone the six hour drive that took twelve.
Stuck with hundreds, nay thousands, of other people there’s not a lot one can do. While thankful for local radio updates, water and snacks, and mindful of those involved in the accidents and incidents which caused the holdups, it was exhausting.
Such occasions as those are often, as the author Lemony Snicket puts it, ‘a series of unfortunate events.’ We can speculate on what caused the lorry to jackknife and perhaps more salutary, what led a young woman to stand on a motorway bridge at four in the morning. Life was more unfortunate for them than it was for me. She was safely led down and cared for, by the way.
All the same, having so many such occasions in a short space of time made me wary and worry about what would happen on the two other long journeys the month required. Will it be the same all over again? What if I’m part of the cause? What if I’m stuck overnight on that late evening trip home? What if the anxiety and panic attacks that racked me all those years ago decided to make an unwelcome reappearance?
Most ‘series of events’ have a rational explanation. Indeed, it’s irrational to think they will therefore automatically happen again. But natural anxiety feeds on such matters and we can find ourselves being so wary and worried that the living of life is affected and even stops. Someone described this overthinking to me as ‘analysis paralysis’.
Many of us are very capable of ‘counting’ the things that go wrong: the mishaps and difficulties which cause us to be wary and worried – and then ‘recounting’ them to other people. And how such anxieties can affect the living of life. They all add up.
On the other hand, like most cliches, there is a deep truth to the saying ‘count your blessings’. Yet somehow, it’s easy not to do so and we can forget to add them up too.
Amidst all the events of the last month, I can count the blessings of being kept safe, that others were patient with my late arrivals, the friends and family who listened to my recounting and the Godly calming of the wariness and worry.
You may like to think about the blessings you can count – and what they all add up to.
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