Anxiety 2.0 (2.0.1)

After the previous post, “Anxiety 2.0“, I decided it should be a series AND a series with updates, just like any other software release.  When software bugs are discovered and addressed, they issue an update, right?  Any one who would like to join me in charting the course of anxiety through the next year, feel free to let us know when your image or words are posted.  The more the merrier.  We can’t throw money at it– that’s the government’s job.  We’ll throw creativity at it.

Pow! Kazaam! Creativity ‘s power has never been needed more in my life and I suspect a few others.

Anyway, this first update (2.0.1) is so soon because I forgot to include one thing in the initial post.

A big difference to me between Anxiety 1.0 and Anxiety 2.0 is the tiniest, faintest whiff of exhiliration that I get when I realize that someone is in charge who is a grown up.

He is not wobbling his lower lip with faux intensity, but telling it as it is:  It is going to get worse before it gets any better.  But, and here are the exhilarating touches–tendrils that are as tender as the green shoots in my frozen backyard– He is equal part present and future.

Without knowing one thing about President Obama’s medical history, I’ll go out on a limb and say definitively: This man will never have an anxiety disorder.

Those of us who do know that living too much in the swirling fears of the present can cancel out the future, not just as a troubling vision– oh, no, that would be manageable–but as a concept itself.  You go from anxiety to extinction in 60 seconds.  We anxious twits go from bleak to bleaker faster than a Lamborghini.

So, we need others to remind us there is a future.

Anxiety 2.0 has that.

That’s not to say, I do not have white knuckles or that I don’t buckle and unbuckle my seatbelt on an hourly basis,  but it calms me, it really does, to hear plans for health care reform, education investment, alternative energy proposals.  Survival is a pre-requiste for those things.

So, it’s where I start.  We’ll survive.  Then, we’ll get better.

Now, let me throw salt over my shoulder.

Kidding, people.  Just goofin’ the tiniest little bit.

(PS.  I chose this photograph for reasons I did not talk about.  Something to do with doors (entrances), keys to them, and in the case of this door from a meeting house in my town dating back to 1853, it has a succession of ways it has been locked and unlocked over the years.  Keyhole. Latch. Deadbolt.   What opened the original door in 1853 gave way to that which opened it in early 19th century, which then gave way to a YALE lock.  You see where I was going with this, right?)

PS. #2: I lost a bet and have now posted on Twitter. Seriously, I can find more ways to bore people than Carter has pills.  My twitter name is w1kkp, too.

©Pat Coakley 2009

PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION