Sometimes, for no reason at all, I’m filled with anxiety. Or dread. Or foreboding. Or whatever that feeling is you get in dreams where you’re in college and it’s finals but you don’t know where your classroom is and you haven’t been to class all semester.
Like I’ve missed something important. And I can’t go back to even find out what it was, much less change it.
I’ve read all the books and the advice and the admonitions. Feeling anxious or worried about what’s unknowable or even about what is, wishing you could change something you did or said or what is inevitable, none of that helps anything at all.
You may as well spend the time, whatever that time is, in whatever place you’re in, having missed something important or not, moving forward. Or being in the moment. Or something other than useless and paralyzing panic that you’ve left on a non-existent burner.
But I don’t know how to do that. So I keep looking for the stove.