I’ve always been an anxious person. I want to blame circumstance – my parents split up when I was very young, as the eldest child I had a lot of responsibilities put on me from a very young age, etc. – but truth be told, my anxious tendencies started long before that. One of my earliest memories was when I was around four years old, landing at the chalkboard in our playroom with my father as he taught me phonetics (I started reading insanely early) and being very upset that I’d made a mistake because I was certain the other children would mock me for it. A good chunk of my free time as a child was learning was to prepare for disasters, both likely and unlikely. I have been known to replay and obsess over conversations that took place fifteen years ago. When planning for the future, I always envision the worst possible circumstances and use that as by baseline for preparation. All things considered, I find it somewhat amazing I don’t have a tiny Doom cloud following me about at all times.
Probably one of the most entertaining examples of this took place on my first day of kindergarten. It started with a mysterious note slipped under the classroom door. The hallway was empty; the note, a taunt from a creature signing himself as “The Gingerbread Man.” Our class was tasked was to go around the building and catch him. The problem was, each place we went, we were told we’d just missed him and had to solve a clue to figure out where he was headed next. It was extremely frustrating. Having seen many spy and action thrillers, I was convinced the gingerbread man may have tossed us a red herring and doubled back, so I made my new friend Brian help me thoroughly check all the wastebaskets and under the chairs, convinced we could find and capture the little perp before he could do something bad. After all, why else would he be on the run? I could only assume nefarious deeds were in play or on the horizon. It didn’t help that I was momentarily sidetracked when we visited the library, something I’d never experienced before, and blamed myself for the GBM getting away that time. The school staff, though helpful in assisting the other children to read the clues, seemed completely oblivious to the impending danger threatened by this gingerbread man, as was evidenced by their failure to try and apprehend it despite their witnessing the creature as it cut through their various rooms and offices.
If only I had been more vigilant…
After about the sixth missed connection, when the school secretary was cheerfully reading the latest clue, I couldn’t take anymore. By this point, the menace of the gingerbread man had grown in my brain to frightening proportions. Was he armed? I imagined he probably had a knife of some sort to defend himself against capture. Again, what was his motive? Was he acting alone? My mind filled with thoughts of a gingerbread gang overrunning the school and forcing the children to cobble shoes like the children in China had to do (that fear was my grandmother’s fault, as her default irritated answer whenever we fussed about something was “Well, just be sure to thank Jesus tonight that you were born in America and have enough food to be picky about and toys to be bored with, unlike those poor starving kids in China who would be thankful to have something to eat and while they work twelve hours a day cobbling shoes!”). It was my fault for not being able to penetrate his diabolical cookie-mind and save my new classmates from their terrible fate.
I started to hiccup, tears streaming down my cheeks. It took a moment for my teacher to realize what was happening, concern taking over as she asked what was wrong. My five year old body quivered a moment as I took a deep breath and wailed,
“WE’RE NEVER GONNA FIND THAT GINGERBREAD MAN!!!”
*****
My adult self now sees the situation for what it was – a fun way for (normal) children to get acclimated to their new surroundings – but I think about that incident a lot when I start worrying about new things. Anxieties can easily spiral out of control if you let them, and as we get older, our concerns gravitate to issues with ever-more-heavy consequences. Will I have a job next year? Can we afford the house we want? Is that mark on my kid normal? Should we spring for extra life insurance? How will our national politics play out? Should I learn prepper skills and take my home off the grid? Why does everything around us seem like it’s going to pot?
Why is nobody doing anything even when that gingerbread man is running right through their office?
Because these things happen. They happen year after year, generation after generation. The details might be different, but the concerns are the same – we’re just in a position to notice now. The gingerbread man is bringing them to light. Concerned about immigration issues? Guess what. Immigration has been an issue for centuries – just ask the Native Americans in the 1800s or the Jewish refugees trying to flee Europe in the 1930s. Scared about cancer rates rising? Last year, Cancer Research UK estimated that in developed Western countries, about half of us will be diagnosed at some point in our lives. That’s because of a combination of better diagnosing tools and the fact that people are living longer than ever before. (And if it makes you feel better, the survival rate is better than at any time in history). Kids today are doing the same stupid things kids have always done, just with crappier music and greater media coverage.
As the list goes on, the point is more clear: These problems have been around for a very long time, and will probably be around for a very long time still. When we’re young, we walk past them all the time without noticing, until a note slips under the door and suddenly we’re chasing our own gingerbread man through all these different issues. Some people will follow the path through all the rooms, some will get stuck on the clues presented and not know where to go next, still others will be unable to see the bigger picture through the frustration of the moment and feel like their objectives will never be achieved. If one gets to that point, sometimes the only thing to do is trundle over to the kitchen, curl up with a cookie and some milk, and talk through your troubles with someone you trust (for five-year-old me, it was my new friend, the lunch lady). At best, you’ll get an extra cookie and perspective to help get you past your fear; at worst, you’ll know that at least you aren’t alone.
My statistics professor in college used to remind us that life is a continual series of ups and downs; what’s important to look at is the average. Yes, we’re going to have outliers from time to time in either the positive or negative direction, and yes, sometimes it takes a while and a lot of data points before you start to get a clear picture of what’s happening. Going back to our ginger bread chase, sometimes you have to search a lot of rooms and do a lot of running back and forth before you find what you seek. The important thing, always, is to remember to work together, keep mindful that the overall trend is headed in a forward direction, and to not give up on a goal solely because it wasn’t reached when you thought it should have.
Still, to this day, whenever I eat a gingerbread cookie, I always bite the legs off first, just in case. It’s best to be prepared.
thefourthcastle.com 