AN EARLY ENGLISH LITANY

Back in the day before there were thrift stores there were junk stores.  Nothing was cleaned up or organized.  There weren’t even price tags on things.  The prices were more a matter of discussion.  Everything  was just all thrown together on shelves to be rummaged through.  Those were the good old days when a trip to the junk store became an exciting treasure hunt.  At least that’s how I felt when I left the store with grimy hands, a big grin on my face and feeling quite clever over the treasures I’d acquired after a bit of good-natured bargaining. 

Most of those treasures have gone by the wayside as I’ve moved across country several times, downsizing with each move.  But one precious junk store find has traveled with me and still inspires me with new interpretation as I continue to grow forward in my life. 

It’s a beautifully hand created illuminated manuscript of an early English litany.  The frame is beaten up, the glass is missing, and there is a little water damage, but the words and artistic illustration continue to touch my heart.

From Ghoulies

And Ghosties

Long Leggitie

Beasties

And Things That

Go Bump in the

Night

Good Lord Deliver Us.

Because I grew up in the Episcopal Church where many Sunday services were filled with litanies ending with the congregation responding with something similar to “Good Lord Deliver Us”, both the rhythm and the ending of this litany were comfortably familiar.  As for the ghoulies and ghosties, well, many of the Psalms from the Old Testament we read in church also seemed rather ghoulish to me at the time, so that didn’t bother me much either. 

Are there still things that go bump in the night for a 76-year-old woman who no longer believes in ghoulies and ghosties?  Oh, hell yes, and they can send me down a dark rabbit hole in a heartbeat while shooting my blood pressure sky high.  They are the thoughts that I call the “what ifs”.

I have found in my life there are the “what is” (things that are actually happening) and the “what ifs” (things that might happen).  They both tend to pop into my life on a regular basis, and I’m not always sure which is which.  Sometimes they just blend together making it hard to know how best to respond.  They can stimulate me into exploration or stifle me into paralysis.  Many of the “what ifs” are negative, but some of them are good and can be turned into an actual event, sending me on a journey of fun-filled adventure. 

Like the summer after my sophomore year in high school when I thought what if instead of a long boring summer, I could take some college classes.  So, on the spur of the moment, with a wild hair you know where, I decided I was ready for college, and I enrolled in a couple of classes at the little college in my hometown.  On the application where I had to indicate where I’d graduated from high school I wrote in large, bold letters Central High School, and in very small letters, I wrote still attending.  I was accepted and ended the best summer ever with an A in Biology and a B in Music Appreciation. 

The “what ifs” that have not been so good have on occasion totally taken over my thought process, sending me into a state of confused panic. 

I remember a wild and crazy anxiety-filled week I had a couple years ago in which I was slammed with multiple challenges all hitting me at once.  It was a week filled with a confused merging of both “what is” and “what if”.  Although my life seemed to be upside-down at the time, I learned some great lessons that week in how to carry on without stroking out, and I’ve carried those lessons with me since then. 

I learned which stressors are most likely to cause my blood pressure to spike upward and what I can do to bring it back down.  More importantly, I learned how to separate the negative from the positive “what ifs”, the “what ifs” from “what is”, and how to best deal with each. 

That week started with a stint in the dentist’s chair for two and a half hours being drilled, poked, jaws clamped wide open, and gums shoved up to my eyeballs.  This was followed by an eye exam a couple days later revealing I had cataracts in both eyes. 

Oh, but wait, there’s more.  Woven in and around these medical issues, a family drama between my siblings was brewing that I felt could boil over at any minute, possibly leading to serious, irreversible consequences. 

The most challenging stressor that week was having the dental work done.  I held my neck and shoulders so tight I nearly passed out.  What I expected to be a simple procedure – having two cavities filled – became more complicated because they were both above the gumline on upper molars.  Something the dentist had failed to tell me prior to the appointment.

Knowing my reaction to the stress was causing my blood pressure to climb, I began silently demanding that I relax my neck and shoulders. 

Every time I focused my attention on relaxing my muscles, I became acutely aware of how tight they were.  My mind did a more perfect flip than my body ever managed to accomplish when I was on the gymnastic team in college.  Instead of focusing on relaxing, it flipped into focusing on the tension. 

As my inability to relax began to take its toll I remembered an affirmation that goes along with a yoga posture I used to do every morning after my walk; “serenity comes when I surrender”. 

Sure enough, the words serenity and surrender were far more effective in helping me to release the muscle tension than the profanity laced command to relax.  What a discovery!

An even more profound discovery was the realization that anger, fear, and pain from actual events do not come close to creating the intense level of havoc in my battle over blood pressure as does traveling down the path of negative “what ifs”. 

What if my brothers succeeded in robbing my sister of her independence?  What if the eye surgeon sneezes during the procedure?  What if the dentist’s drill goes too far and enters my sinus cavity? 

Note To Self: When faced with multiple, intense stressors remember to take a deep breath in and do not forget to let it out.

Managing my blood pressure is far easier when I focus on real situations.  It is all the dark, misty, fantasy filled imaginings of those negative “what ifs” that go bump in the night as they float in and out of my mind that tend to do me in.  Even then, a good calming mantra sheds light on all those negative thoughts and I’m at peace once again.

I left the dentist’s office after my serenity-surrender mantra kicked in with a blood pressure of 120/74.  That’s not bad for an old broad who refuses to take blood pressure medicine unless or until it becomes necessary.

Being budget conscious, it would be hard for me to justify spending money on alcohol if I had to pay for medication.  I prefer to spend my money on red wine and the occasional bourbon instead of blood pressure meds for as long as possible.   So, I keep my blood pressure monitor handy and a good relaxing mantra on the tip of my tongue. 

I never know when one of those long leggitie beasties from the negative “what ifs” might pop up just to test me.