ANXIETY & FINDING FOCUS

WITH A SIDE TRIP TO THE MEKONG

In these wonderful Chiang Mai weeks of sunshine and low expectations I’ve found myself strangely anxious at times. I’ve been lucky in many things in life, among them that I’m not a person given to strong feelings of anxiety. I worry about making mistakes when others are relying on me, or about reading a situation badly, but I don’t usually live with anxious thoughts besieging me

bougainvillea in the neighbourhood

Yet in my weeks here I have found myself regularly tensing with worried thoughts, a kind of anticipatory anxiety, especially as I lie in bed, but also in broad daylight. Several weeks ago I was worrying because I couldn’t visualise getting on my bicycle here and riding around. The prospect felt very daunting. But I pumped up my tires, still doubting myself, then got the bicycle downstairs and got on. It immediately felt reassuringly familiar, a kind of magical transformation, and off I pedalled.. I think I mentioned this here on Substack

an old chedi in the neighbourhood

A similar thing happened last weekend. My friend and colleague Fern and I had a plan to drive up to Chiang Khong, a small city on the Mekong, opposite Huay Xai in Laos on the other shore. It’s a lovely place. We want to include it in next January’s ImmerseThrough trip, but of course we needed to do a recce. The day before we were due to leave the anxiety started: I couldn’t imagine driving. It felt daunting and impossible.

morning view of the Mekong in Chiang Khan; forest monks walking through the town

The rental car, a small Toyota, was waiting downstairs next morning. I asked Fern to drive us out of Chiang Mai, with the excuse that traffic might be complicated. An hour later, well up the road, we stopped for a coffee break, and then it was my turn. Yikes. But once I was sitting in the (very comfortable) driver’s seat and had checked the mirrors and other details, suddenly I was able to be present with all my reflexes. The anxiety had fled. I enjoyed the driving, settled into it and into paying close attention. There was a relief in having all my senses directed to the one thing: driving us safely up the road.

Is this what’s going on with my anxiety and fragility? Is it about fractured attention, a split or cracked mental state that works against being present and focused? The ongoing grief and emotional exhaustion do undermine my resilience and fragment my thinking. That must be the explanation, or a good part of it. And then when focus is absolutely necessary (me in the driver’s seat for example), the fragments reassemble, the cracks disappear, the mind pulls itself together, and I feel fully present and able. What a relief. I have the power to be present and capable, to fully inhabit myself.

Is this why prayer beads calm people? The focus on a prayer per bead perhaps directs the mind, steadying things. The splinters and fragments created by anxiety vanish or maybe instead they glue themselves back together. Whichever the better metaphor, the result is healing

detail of Tai Yuan weaving, at a workshop beside Wat Phra That Pha Ngao, not far from Chiang Saen

Perhaps my form of anxiety can be described as fractured attention. Finding a focus pulls the broken pieces together so they’re functional again.

Our drive out of Chiang Khong next morning took us on a small road that curves north and west along the river. It follows the route of the rough road we drove long ago with friends when my older kid Dom was barely two. We were in an old blue truck we’d rented from a Karen man in Chiang Mai. We stayed in a Hmong village up that road for a night, watching the local guys play takraw in the evening, then drove on to the then-sleepy town of Chiang Saen the next day.

The road is now paved and the villages along it well built, prosperous looking, and much less agricultural. It’s quite different from how things looked nearly forty years ago.

We made that trip a year before Tashi was born. And here I was bracketing his existence, remembering times before him (which he’d heard about growing up) and moving forward into stories I won’t be able to share with him. That’s what’s so strange and so disconcerting: the future story-telling, the living forward, will be happening without him. He’ll be in my mind, and I imagine that I’ll often try to picture how he would react to this or that story, but…

I had a bout of flatness, low-energy grey thoughts, and dead-endedness after we got back. A kind of grey funk started to invade. I couldn’t find the energy to draw, to plan, to do anything fun or interesting. I started turning to my phone for distraction, a deadly tactic, and then bumped up against a “no connection” message. I’d run out of data on my eSim.

Without my phone as a distraction I found myself shockingly adrift. It made me realise that when I am a bit lost, when I don’t have a clear idea of what to do next, I use my phone to fill the gaps. I was reminded of the long ago days when I smoked cigarettes. I’d use rolling a cigarette or lighting one to fill a gap, to help me transition to my next step or to think about what I wanted to do next. When I quit smoking (at the ripe age of twenty-two) I found the hardest thing was not having the distraction of something to do with my hands. I missed the small breaks that rolling or lighting a cigarette created in the day.

This phone data interruption was a wake-up call. If our days are numbered, and we know they are, then what am I doing spending my precious days scrolling? The fragments of news I consume, and the reels on Instagram, erode concentration without contributing anything much. I should at least be day-dreaming when I have open time!

young women streetside in Chiang Mai

One way to be more mindful about my phone use might be simply to ask myself each time I reach for it: Why are you looking? What can’t wait? The other, more positive tack is to make sure that I am actively engaged during the day: in reading, doing chores, seeing friends, making plans, writing, drawing, daydreaming All these things are world expanding and energy-giving.

I’ve resolved to remind myself to keep my eyes open and my mind’s eye too…

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS - eating tea leaf salad, and market scenes

Yesterday, we cycled west and slightly uphill past Chiang Mai university towards the bulk of Doi Sutep, the large mountain that frames Chiang Mai’s valley on the west. We turned south up a side road, headed to a temple in the forest called Wat Umong. It’s a peaceful place, at least in the early morning before many visitors arrive. It’s built a little like a fortress, on a hill, with the chedi (stupa) up on the flat top surface. There are tunneled passages underneath and earthworks supporting the walls.

Below the square height of the pagoda there is a line of damaged buddha statues – heads and some bodies - resting on leaf-strewn earth under large trees. It’s a peaceful calming scene. Signage tells us that they were gathered from abandoned temples in the 1970’s and brought to Wat Umong. They were made by Phayao area sculptors working in the 1400’s and 1500’s.

We pedaled back a toward the city a different way, taking guesses at the route, unworried. It felt great to just let go. And then once near the river we headed across Nawarot Bridge to Ninme, a Burmese Tea Shop near Wat Gaet. What a pleasure to have attentively made Burmese salads and good rice to restore us.

cured duck and beef at a Haw woman’s stall; eggplants of many kinds here, small squash on the right, and hibiscus on the left

This morning I was back at the Yunnan Market, eating mohinga, photographing gorgeous produce, falling into conversation with people at the mohinga stall. Such pleasure. I have another nine days here to revel in it all…

this morning’s mohinga, as I started to stir it together