Anticipation

Between one trip and another, the gratitude for home is laced with wakefulness at 3 a.m.  Sometimes this is due to jetlag.  Sometimes anxiety.  Often both.

My physicist finds travel exhilarating and usually refreshing.  Catbird on the other hand, finds it stressful and tiring.  Especially in the planning stages.  What will the universe throw our way?  How do we prepare for it?  Do we have everything we need? These questions challenge Catbird's ongoing efforts to BE HERE NOW.  

Daily meditation/centering prayer are peppered with little reminders of things Catbird means to do, needs to do, must not forget to do, in anticipation of the next trip.  Catbird has grudgingly accepted a to-do list next to her bed so that when these travel-worthy ideas assault the quiet of centering breath--and refuse to go away--she writes them down.  Duly acknowledged, they tend to quiet down.   Then she begins the breath count again.   (This is a page out of her parenting experience: Catbird learned early that those little voices will shrill down once they know they've been heard.) 

Last week, Catbird dreamed she had hurt her father's feelings by selecting the wrong sized cane.   Since Dad has been dead for almost three years, Catbird spent some time trying to decode this message from her deep psyche.  Finally she just chalked it up to free-floating anxiety.

Despite the amount of preparation required for the next trip, and the amount of anxiety attached to it, we've been maintaining a pretty rigorous schedule of physical activity.   Sweat and an accelerated heart rate are the tools Catbird  has since giving up mood altering substances back in '87. 

There doesn't seem to be enough physical activity to create a haven of rest against the worries about the next trip, though.  In Buea, Cameroon, my physicist and his chums will deliver the 3rd Hands-On Research School in Complex Systems.  http://handsonresearch.org/index.html  Since this is not our first Hand-On School, and this is not our first trip to Cameroon, one might think we'd know what to expect and that is somewhat true.  It is also true, however, that what we expect is that this one will be hard.  Catbird doesn't want to even think about those details now, so they will be fodder for another blog.  

Meanwhile, it is time to sit comfortably, close her eyes, breathe in to the count of 8...out to the count of 16...in to the count of 10...out to the count of 20...Yikes, where are the vaccination cards?