I remember playing spaceship under an old picnic table in a neighbor’s yard up the hill, up Brownsville’s Owen Street, up on Margin Street. A few of us were lost in our imaginations which took us to sights unseen even today by Mars’s rovers and moon landings. No satellite images exist of what we assembled in our mind’s eye. We were lost in our thoughts until I bumped my head against the underside of the table. It was cushioned by a pillow of yellowjackets nesting.
We got out of there faster than the brain can form a thought. Pure fear! The Saturday morning cartoons we watched could not have painted a better picture of kids scattering down a hilly street swatting at stinging varmints in pursuit of helpless victims. The welts were numerous, and the stings penetrated my primeval memory so that I never sit at a picnic table in a park before taking a cautious peak underneath.
But what concerns me more than what’s under the picnic tables I sit on and more than the wretchedness of yellowjackets in pursuit, is the prospect of managing my thoughts a dozen times each day. This is especially true these days. Our hours are challenged with the normal comings and goings of accidents, altercations, ailments, and ordinary exposures to anxiety; but then we have the unpredictable pandemic pilling on top like kids playing football in the park.
I ask myself the question these dozen times a day, “How am I going to allow myself to feel about such and such?” It certainly is up to me. One can sub come to the flood of stinging notions of reactionary inner sensations and get washed away by the title wave of wasps swarming over: but what good reason do you have to do that to yourself? What reason would you allow yourself the suffering of welts welling up on the skin of your mind allowing an anxiety based on artificial reality. We really do suffer what is completely avoidable if we do not refuse the demons that seek to demolish our tranquility with their fictions. For you see, these noxious notions of the way things just might happen – these imaginary things that others just might think, are no more real than mickey mouse. They not only have not happened; but they are likely never to happen at all. If you don’t ask the question we could be asking, then you get to suffer anyway.
Jesus said, “Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6;34 CSB).
Stephen Williams