On Walking, on Anxiety – Monday 28th November

It’s barely four, but already there’s a mercurial, silvered quality to the light. The mud  on the pathway gleams in the flat patches, and the crows are loud in the cricket oaks, arguing about sleeping spots.

The dogs and I are in the fields below the dryer, Pants looping over the long, stitched lines of rye. The sheep are gone now, until Spring, and the fields are easy to walk, good for a quick whiz, when you’re behind with everything you should’ve done.

I check my watch twice in ten seconds, knowing I’m late for the horses, then catch myself. These days, my brain will pluck at the slightest worry, stash it away in the Basket of Woe. I like to unpack the basket whenever I get a moment of stillness, all these things to worry about, to turn over in my hands, say whatever am I going to do with you? Nothing, usually. I just put them back in the basket, carry on lugging them all about.

I read, recently, that a basic aspect of anxiety is the unexpected (the paper’s here, by Thierry Steimer and is FASCINATING). To combat this, I’ve been trying to think through the unexpected part of things, so they at least become expected. I’ll be late to the horses, so? It’ll be dark. I’ll have to put them to bed in the dark. So? Um…I might…No. I have just as much chance of sloshing a water bucket down my thigh as I do in daylight. Just as much chance of upending myself in the gate bog.

How many times do I do this anxiety thing, feel this tightening in my stomach, grip the handle of that damn basket so hard, my fingers grow numb? There is no real consequence to my being late for the horses, my brain just grabbed a thought – I’ll be late – and scrunched it quickly into the woe basket. How to stop it, that’s the thing.

The temperature feels as if it’s dropped whilst we’ve been out. There’s a very faint veil of mist, twisting through the alders down by the brook. The air is very still, cold, the dampness of the morning still evident on bent grass, the rosettes of field thistles. We trespass up the rye, back up to the dryer barn, come along beside the horses’ field. I reach the place where the hedge stops, stand to watch them for a moment. They’re stuffing their faces with hay, utterly unbothered that I’m not there with my barrow, their tea.

Across the field, Ferny lifts her head, looks at me. I click at her, call her beautiful. She flattens her ears, drops her head. Couldn’t care less, the furry fecker, about baskets and worries and nearly dark. Bubbles comes in too close, and Fern swishes her tail at him, tosses her head. Then she returns to eat, ears twitching to track him. As I watch her, I imagine the woe basket, placed neatly by my feet in the long grass. I’ll pick it back up again – I’m a mum, a wife, of course I will – but for now it’s on the grass. And I’m just watching the horses.