So on Thursday, I was getting ready to leave the house for a field trip to Montreal with 4 classes from school. Since I raise monarch butterflies and share this experience with the students every year, I wanted the kids to experience hundreds of butterflies flying all around them and occasionally landing on them to pose for a pretty picture at the Montreal Botanical Garden.
I wanted everything to be perfect on the trip (control freak) and had prepared photocopies of maps, schedule and who went in which bus for the teachers. I was trying to leave nothing to chance. My anxiety was mounting as I tried to leave the house to go the 400 meters to school.
Round and round I went through the house checking to make sure the cat was in the house, the dryer was off, there were no candles burning in the bathroom, no computers left on in the house, the night life was off and even unplugged, the front door was locked, my Kobo was powered off, the coffee pot and kettle were unplugged and the stove burners were cool and the oven was off.
In the last month, I can usually leave the house after having checked 3 or 4 times, I wish I could write once or twice, but I'd be fibbing to make myself look better in my own eyes.
Thursday morning, I must have gone around a dozen times. I didn't count. I knew that my brain was in overdrive. It was probably red hot. It feels like a record skipping and going over the same bit of song over and over again. My needle is dull. My brain never believes what it sees. My eyes see that everything is OK, but my insecure mind pushes me to check "just one last time" touching everything. I made it to school with about 5 or 10 minutes to spare before the bell went off. I would have liked getting in a bit earlier even though everything was ready for the trip.
The day went well. The kids were enchanted by the animals at the Biodôme and the butterflies fluttering around them in the big greenhouse.
(Just an aside. The first robin just landed in my yard!!)
I don't want to beat myself up when I have a major relapse. I want to keep getting better and so I remind myself constantly to focus on the present. Searching for clues in my past hasn't helped me so far, so I might as well focus on the now instead of worrying about the future and what may happen. I've learned that most of the time we are quite safe in the present and when something bad happens in our lives, it usually comes out of left field and we never saw it coming anyway. So as the good book says worrying won't add a day to my life. Trying to control my life won't help much either.
Eckart Tolle wrote that when something major happens, you either survive it or you don't. Now, that's pretty straight forward.
When I started this blog almost a month ago, I wanted to be over OCD in 31 days. I'm going to have to renew this goal for another month. I don't know if I'll ever be completely over it. I'd really wish for an evangelical rebirth healing of some sort but that in itself would require very little effort on my part. Perhaps, my rebirth will be in going through each new day, each new moment, focusing on what is real in the present moment rather than going to the dark part of my fears and letting my mind go wild on worries like a cotton candy crazed kid in an amusement park.
On this note, I must get out of my purple leopard print fleece jammies and focus on getting the house clean and brunch ready. We've got company coming.
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