One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is anxiety and worrying. We all know worrying doesn’t help, right? But being worried in order to prepare can. I’ve mentioned my timehop app here before, when I read what I posted or took pictures of 1 year ago on the day, 2 years, etc. 1 year ago yesterday I posted about how I was preparing for the pandemic, buying canned goods, toilet paper, etc. Turned out it was a pretty good idea.

But not everything I bought was useful. I bought some jugs of water, and I didn’t need them, but I would have in Texas the other week, so I have no regrets about my water purchases. And we’ve done well, we have been fortunate enough to stay well, though at great personal sacrifice. We haven’t seen family inside or my family in person since late summer (and not much before that, but in late summer with most of us being careful it seemed a good risk.) We haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since March. Since my sister and her kids left in late summer, I haven’t been inside unmasked with anyone except Louie. I can’t remember the last time we did something social, because it got too cold to want to be outside and it felt like an unnecessary risk. I don’t quite know how we will reenter the world.

I’m thankful we have stayed well though, and I hope we continue to until we are able to get vaccinated. I don’t know what happens then. I don’t know how to be social anymore, and I don’t know how to have conversations with people that aren’t about teaching or COVID. It’ll be a strange re-entry when it happens.

I was thinking about other times I’d been stressed about something that seemed silly. One time was on a hike in Zion a few years ago. We hiked up to Observation Point and it was a beautiful hike, scary in parts. When we got to the top we ate our lunch and took a few pictures, but the sky looked a little scary so we headed down. It seemed silly to be so worried about the weather, but then towards the end of the hike the skies opened up and it poured rain. We got on the shuttle back to our campground and it was a deluge. Rain, hail, thunder and lighting. We got to the campground and made a run for our car. I recall sitting in the car, listening to the clunk, clunk, thump of the hail on the windshield, the roof, the hood.

The view from Observation Point.

You can read my original blog post about this experience here, but here’s what you should know. I was thinking about this hike yesterday, and remembering being stressed on the way down about the weather, and thinking, oh, that was silly, why do I overreact? And truthfully, I should have just enjoyed the walk anyway, but I was stressed because we were hurrying to get down, and the truth was it was a great idea! It was a terrible storm, and I didn’t hear of anybody getting hurt during it, but it was terrible and dangerous and we were glad to have not been outside in much of it. My anxiety was well-placed!

Of course, there’s a nice expression about not borrowing tomorrow’s problems or whatever, but it’s really nice sometimes to know that your worrying simply meant you prepared. In the hiking case, we didn’t prepare, but we hurried down. In the case of the lead up to the terrible COVID pandemic it meant we had a lot of groceries and such on hand and didn’t have to make a run to the store.

But how do I balance feeling too worried and stressed with actually just being prepared in life? I worry (ha!) that staying home so much has made me more stressed about going out into the world! Then again, being concerned about getting COVID has done that more.

In any case! The other one year mark coming up will be the anniversary of my cat Miles returning home. We got him back the same day we got home from our last trip, after our last meals out…how should we celebrate an anniversary of a cat’s homecoming?

Have you changed much of your life over the past year, or have things stayed the same for you? If (like most people) many things have changed, do you think it will be difficult to get back into the world? Do you think that an appropriate level of anxiety is necessary to be responsible?