Emily Articulated: Tomorrow’s problems

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

The ground crunched with every step I took, its dirt pocked with vertical frost crystals midway through heaving themselves from their depths to the sky — a journey cut short (satisfyingly) under my feet.

I took a deep breath and exhaled, the cloud of warm air swirling as it mixed with the landscape before me. I was at the start of a rock field, barely visible beneath a layer of fresh snow. As I began my route, hopping from snow mound to rock tip to ice-dusted earth, “Don’t borrow tomorrow’s problems,” popped into my head. 

The phrase had been following me around for weeks, dredged up by some show or podcast, and inserting itself in my life and mind, in snatched conversations, in the line of my book and of my own creation, as if wanting to single-handedly prove the Baader-Meinhof frequency illusion. 

This latest resurfacing was another example of the phrase not perfectly matching my surroundings, but hardly straining my brain’s ability to weave metaphors and draw connections between themes. I get it. Without knowing the exact makeup of the rocks under my feet — and despite not knowing the conditions I’ll encounter with each step — I trust myself to react, adjust and find balance with every new and inevitable change. I had faith in my feet to figure it out, to make the right moves when the time came for them to be made, without any need for preparation or worry.

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

It was yet another reminder that there was a part of me, deeper and more native than my recent foray into anxiety, that knows I can handle the unknown.

If I had to pinpoint the start of my experience with anxiety, I’d pick the pandemic, with every extension of isolation and iteration of fear-inducing headline fueling my existential dread. This generalized worry about the state of the world was sharpened into personal experience, with news that my dad’s liver was failing and that I would be the person responsible for helping him navigate his end of life, 2,000 miles away.

Ruminating on the “big things” — like the state of the world, safety and equity for people in our country, the growing divisiveness in our community, the health and wellness of the people I love, and my own bouts of injury and sickness — was quickly compounded by the “little things,” too.

Three o’clock in the morning became my time to build to-do lists for work, to reenact my latest uncomfortable conversations, to make plans for getting a mole checked on my back, to contemplate my dad’s care and to wonder if I paid my latest cellphone bill. 

In the mania of racing thoughts, my body searched for fast-paced distractions to counter it all, pressing play on an audiobook while listening to music and scrolling on Instagram. The spaces in my mind that I used to dedicate to thinking, drawing connections, processing feelings and finding closure, were filled with a cacophony of misplaced fear and distraction.

Then there’d be moments of respite — physical reminders of the calm below the surface, like the race I ran with my goal being to “enjoy the downhills.” After every big climb, I dug into present-ness, allowing myself to revel in the absolute freedom that came from not fighting gravity, and not diminishing my joy by fixating on the impending uphill.

Or my trip to see the towering peaks of the French Alps, somehow so big that my brain didn’t have room to think about anything else but their absoluteness. As I took in their magnitude, I was reminded that I was built for witnessing beauty (and not just the kind that was so immensely in my face).

Slowly, and with a leveling of my “big things,” these moments of respite grew in frequency, tunneling into my mind like placeholders for the to calm to which I wanted to return; like the frost in early winter, dredged up from its deepest places just to reconnect with sky.

So now, I welcome every “Don’t borrow tomorrow’s problems,” for the simple and applicable message of it, and as a signal that I’m reforging the space to think in metaphors, to tune in to my surroundings and to rediscover the parts of myself previously lost to worry.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.