For any Douglas Adams fan, the words “Don’t Panic” will likely raise an instant smile. Its also seriously good advice. Packed into my life have been several moments, where Panic would have been a perfectly reasonable response, reasonable, but largely ineffective.
There was the time during one of my shifts at a night shelter for homeless people, where a psychotic resident had me in an arm lock and threatened to slice me open with a vicious looking sheath knife. The Police Officer who eventually attended the stand off looked markedly more panicked than I felt. Or indeed the moment on one of my very earliest solo flights, when I arrived back over the airport to find that some particularly foul weather had moved in and completely covered the active runway in cloud down to about 500 feet. Panic was not an option, flying a solo bad weather circuit at below the legal height was one of the more exciting moments of my flying training.
So yesterday morning, as I waved Jane off on her push bike, Panic could not have been further from my mind. Which is puzzling, because just seconds after a furiously pedalling Jane had slipped from view I was shaking like the proverbial leaf, and struggling to quell a rising sense of Panic that came from nowhere, but threatened to leave me breathless on the floor. A single thought, that deserved no further analysis became a roaring avalanche of negative ideas, cascading, accelerating, and engulfing my entire consciousness. I was convinced that I had seen Jane for the last time, and was for a few minutes crippled by fear, about which I could do nothing.
Of course Jane arrived home as scheduled, and the anxiety that kept me tethered to a feeling of despair throughout the day dissolved far less dramatically than it arrived.
I’m sharing this because like all of the other challenges I have faced, I know I am not alone in dealing with this degree of Irrational Anxiety. As the Antidepressants kick in I plan on reporting their effectiveness at diminishing these illogical terrors.
Onwards and Upwards !!!!
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