Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: Am I in control or is my anxiety?

Very few people are so superhuman–or isolated–to be completely free of anxiety in the midst of a pandemic.  I think the first step to learning to live with that anxiety is to acknowledge that.  You can’t control something by ignoring it.   The next step is to understand what specifically triggers it.  Personally, what really sets me off is “OMG We’re All Gonna DIIIIIIIEEEEE” clickbait headlines or graphics that might be a bit science-informed, but mostly come down to one person talking about Awful Shit That Might Happen But Then Again It Might Not.  To use one example, there was an article going around a couple days ago with a headline something like “How Variants Will Lead to a Cat. 5 Pandemic Storm.”  Ugh.  The ONLY thing that kind of headline is good for is inducing panic.  There is not one thing I can do about “new variants” that I’m not already doing, and I’m already tempering my expectations about the speed and efficacy of the response.  Just enough already.  So I don’t click.  If I hear this kind of thing on the radio, I turn it off.  Again, THERE IS NOTHING MORE THAT IS IN MY CONTROL THAT I CAN DO.  Sleepless nights will not help me cope or get me through this more quickly.

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This will be a short post today.   I want to see how much of The Land Beyond the Sea I can knock off tonight.  With the scribal challenge looming for this weekend (I now know my assignment), I want to see if I can finish the book, and I am right at the 1/3 mark right now.

The mailbox had some good news for me today.  No, not my apparently missing book (which as of tomorrow will have been in Canada–allegedly–for 4 weeks) but rather our US stimulus checks, which nicely paid for Dave’s new computer.  I also got in my new wrist pad, which is already 10 times better than the rather ratty one that just met its demise.

And I’ll have some Shostakovich from the Columbus Symphony to watch on Friday.  The listing says it’s the Chamber Symphony, op. 73a.  I’m really hoping that’s correct, because I’ve never seen a performance of this particular Chamber Symphony.  Everyone does the 110a instead.  In fact, the program notes for the concert seem to think that’s the one being performed as well.  So it will be a bit of a mystery that I will eagerly await a resolution for.