I have been quiet for a little while.
Not intentionally, or not entirely. Life simply took precedence in the way that life sometimes does, loudly, inconveniently, and with very little regard for the writing schedule or anything else I had in mind.
I moved house. Well, actually I moved country to move house! Spain to the UK. And in doing so, I discovered something I perhaps should have already known.
Everything I’ve been writing about, tending your inner world, finding your ground, the practice of returning, is of course considerably easier to write about than to actually live, especially when the ground itself is moving.
A truck, somewhere in Portugal
It started with a bird strike.
My flight from Spain with my partner and 6 checked in cases, was grounded for 13-hours while repairs needed to be made. That was 13 hours we didn’t budget for. Stuck in one of Spain’s small and boring airports. I was already exhausted, but such is life eh, and not entirely the end of the world. I knew that, I told myself that.
But knowing something and actually feeling it, as we’ve established, are very different things. We eventually got in the air and landed at our UK destination in the early hours of the next morning.
And then to cap it all, my boxes went missing.
Not lost exactly. Just… on an unscheduled tour of Europe.
You get what you pay for! The removal truck was picking up and delivering across southern Europe and then somewhere in Portugal, not exactly sure where, in fact nobody seemed entirely certain. But the truck broke down and was garaged there for three days while arrangements were made.
Meanwhile, my entire home, well the final belongings that I couldn’t cull, were in transit. All my worldly belongings. My books, my things, the accumulated objects of my life. All of it sitting in a vehicle that I couldn’t locate, in a country I wasn’t in, waiting.
I would love to tell you that I met this with equanimity. That I breathed, noticed the feeling, gave it ninety seconds, and returned to my ground.
But alas, I did not.
What anxiety actually feels like
There is a particular quality to the anxiety that arrives when you genuinely don’t know if something is going to be alright. Not the 3am spiral kind, where some part of you knows you’re catastrophising. This was different. This was the kind where the catastrophe was at least plausible.
I felt it in the way we talked about in Post 2.
Not as a label, ‘anxious’, ‘stressed’ but as something very physical and specific. A tightness that lived just below my sternum. A hum that wouldn’t quite settle. The relentless, exhausting loop of trying to solve something I had no power to solve.
And underneath the anxiety, anger. At circumstances, at logistics, at the sheer inconvenience of it all. At myself, a little, for not handling it better.
I noticed all of it. And for a while, noticing was all I could do.
The shift
I’m not sure exactly when it happened. There wasn’t a dramatic moment of clarity, no sudden flood of calm. It was a lot more subtle and quiet than that.
At some point, I think I was simply worn out by the circular motion of worry and frustration, so I simply decided to stop focusing on the problems and start focusing on what could actually be done.
Not what should have happened.
Not who might be at fault, the blame game.
Just what was available to me in this red-hot moment.
It sounds almost absurdly simple. And perhaps it is. But something changed when I made that shift.
It wasn’t just internally, but perhaps more importantly, it was more about how I showed up with the people I was dealing with. The logistics companies, the removal team, the various humans on the end of various phones.
Without the anger underneath, I was different. I was actually present with them rather than simply trying to extract what I needed from them. And slowly, things started to move in positive directions.
The boxes arrived. Nearly three weeks late, taking a scenic route I hadn’t planned, but they arrived.
And here is the quietly wonderful thing, the chaos of the storage arrangements actually ended up saving me a lot of money. Although now the hallway of my temporary apartment is currently floor to ceiling with boxes. I can just about navigate around them, and two cats who are deeply confused about why they no longer have a garden are now enjoying an impromptu adventure playground.
It is anything but elegant. But it is fine. It is, in fact, more than fine.
What this taught me about the practice
I’ve been sitting with this experience for a while now, trying to understand what it actually showed me.
The inner eco-system we’ve been exploring together through my articles, the tending, the noticing, the felt sense, really doesn’t make you immune to difficulty.
It doesn’t stop the ground from moving.
It doesn’t protect you from the 13-hour delay or the truck in Portugal or the creeping fear that something precious and irreplaceable might simply be gone.
However, I do believe that by consistent practice over years we develop sufficient resilience that we are able to keep a small part of ourselves available.
We are present enough to notice the loop we’ve dropped into.
Present enough that at some point, even when exhausted and frustrated and running out of patience, we really can find our way back to the one question that actually matters.
What is available to me right now?
Not why is this happening to me? Not looking to apportion blame. Not focused on the worst-case scenario?
Simply a case of what can I actually tend, right now, from here?
A small act of tending for this week
If you’re in a period of upheaval, not the inner wobble kind, but the kind where your external world is genuinely in motion, allow me to offer you something concrete.
You don’t have to tend yourself beautifully right now.
You don’t have to find the deep calm or the ninety-second pause or the perfect return to your practice.
You just have to ask, once, gently:
What is available to me right now?
Not the whole path. Just the next thing. Just the small ‘tendable’ thing that is actually in reach.
The truck will arrive. The boxes, eventually arrive.
And sometimes the chaos that looked like pure obstacle turns out, quietly, to have a huge benefit hidden inside the eye of the storm.
Winter always turns to spring. It always has. And it always will.
Have a gentle week.
Kathy 🥰