Earthquake at the Back Door

 

It happened on a Friday. Not last Friday but a few Fridays ago. Around about tea-time. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I was standing beside the back door at the time. Could I have been about to check the washing on the line? It had been out there for a while, waiting for a warmer day, a drier day, a day when there was a snapping breeze.

I had a panic attack.

Now, you might have had too many to count. Goodness knows there are plenty of things out lurking behind corners waiting to ambush you. Or maybe not out there at all. Maybe they drop on the hall carpet wrapped in brown paper, stamped and falling just below the letterbox.

I have had ripples of panic before. The low impact ones that can be waved away by drinking tea and reading a book. Or, in my case, picking up my knitting and completing a row of yarn over, sl1, knit1 and pass slipped stitch over.

This was not a ripple. It was earthquake size and although nothing on the outside was falling over, inside worries and anxieties were slamming down everywhere like mental boulders. Yes, the unfixed toilet seat was there, and the ironing pile which inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room. The felting on the shed roof was slapping in the hurricane wind and that Zoom meeting I was leading later, the one I wasn’t looking forward to, you know, the one where I might have to challenge unkind behaviour from a previous week, was drawing near. Switching off lights to save electricity meant I was living in the dark. And I was perpetually cold from fear of wasting heat.

It was just too much.

I stood beside the backdoor, a rabbit caught in the headlamps of life. Rooted, not running, feeling some kind of end hurtling towards me.

‘Go and do the washing up.’ Some might think it was a random thought. As a person of faith, I don’t think that way. It might me my voice, in my head, but the uniqueness of the thought makes me think it is possibly not my thoughts.

There are so many times where we are not in control. Re-reading my list, I admit that most, if not all, of those things are actually within my control. I have an iron and an ironing board so that pile that inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room doesn’t have to be there. Maybe it is the accumulation of things that I could have dealt with, but didn’t, that caused the overload. It felt like things were spiralling out of control.

I went and did the washing up. It was one thing, one small thing, that I could control. I could fill up the bowl, add a dash washing up liquid, and restore order somewhere.

The earthquake subsided.

Sometimes what is needed in those moments when the earthquake within begins is to find the one small thing that can be done. One little corner of control. And just focus on that.