This morning, I read this brilliant blog post by Cheltenham Maman about how anxiety over our children’s health and wellbeing can affect us. The post provides some sound advice for helping to manage parental anxiety so it’s certainly worth a read if you’re struggling with this. I also wrote this post last week about how I feel so consumed by the hypervigilant state that being a bereaved mother has put me in.
In Cheltenham Maman’s post, she wrote something that struck me.
Liken it to other things in life that are certain; winter will come each year but we don’t let it dampen how much we enjoy the summer.
We can be anxious – and therefore depressed about our anxiety – every day of our lives, worrying about something bad happening but, just like we ‘dread’ the cold, dark winter months, we also look forward to the summer and make the most of the warmer days when they do happen.
This is powerful stuff!
Yes, just like life and death, we need to make the most of the better days, the healthy days, the young days, the carefree days. It is inevitable that winter will come, death is something no one can escape from, so try not to waste precious time worrying about the cold while you’re bathing in sunlight.
Yet there’s a caveat to this beautiful metaphor.
Because we know that winter is coming, we make plans about how we will cope with it. We get the boiler serviced, we insulate our homes, we buy in supplies that protect against the frost, we buy a new warm coat, we eat warming, hearty foods…
We prepare for winter and so winter, while still cold and dark, is more bearable and we can see hope in the spring and summer just around the corner.
So why not prepare for death? Prepare for the worst?
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