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eulogy for my father
Its coming up on six months ago since Dad passed away. I’ve been missing him as baseball season winds down. He would have been so happy seeing his Tigers winning the division and playing so strong going into the playoffs. He admitted to me that it was a bigger deal the Tigers winning the World Series then me being born back in 1968. They hadn’t won since 1947 and he had other kids. He denied it when I teased him about it later but I didn’t take offense. There was no competition in his love for baseball, it was welcoming and I knew it didn’t mean he didn’t love me a lot, he just really loved baseball. Watching it with him taught me some of its nuance. I’m still not really patient enough for baseball but its coming.
I wrote the first half the night that Dad died. It opens very strident and I guess I was mustering gumption to do something different, defy convention. The second I wrote the weekend after and put most of a week into feeling my grief full time. And walking the dog. It was time well spent and Dad had an easy story to tell and I was blessed to be privy to the details.
These words brought me a lot of comfort and I am indeed blessed to have been raised in such away to cultivate them. Dad was really a poet. One of the last things really hit his lyricism, “I’m so tired of holding my eyes closed”. He could be sparse like that, spare I guess is a better word. Well its already a long piece so I shouldn’t put in too much of a prologue, except to say I hope it makes you think and if it brings you comfort I’m glad.
“Eulogy For My Father”
3780 words or so
“This above all, to thine own self be true. “ I am not really a minister and I don’t really want to be doing this. I am a grieving son and I want to be sitting next to my brothers and sisters, crying some, laughing some, squeezing an arm in reassurance, an arm across my back in love and support. I want to hear words of beauty and consolation in celebration of a life well lived by someone who knows and loves my Dad and will tell his story with truth, compassion, and respect, in accord with what my dad believed in a way that resonates with what I believe, with what we all believe. That was simply not going to happen. There is a narrow band of belief that dominates most discourse on matters of the spiritual. If you adhere to one of its dominant strains you might not have even noticed, or only noticed the slight difference when you hear someone talk from another dominant strain. But many of us are outside of that, un-believers or simply un-churched. We patiently sit through funerals, weddings and the like and listen to stuff that is irrelevant at best and often frankly offensive. So if I talk about some stuff that church people feel uncomfortable with just hang in there and bear with me, hold on to what is good. Believe it or not, I’m trying to be a uniter not a divider. Take what you need and leave the rest. But for a half hour at least these words are mostly, for the rest of us.
Mr. John Paul Trapp Senior has a story that is long and complicated. It spans generations, a continent, and is in small part outside the bounds of what the masses of men believe perhaps, at least what men say they believe. Funerals are fundamentally an act of the sacred and need touch upon the ineffable, the spiritual wonder of the transition to the next great adventure, or how else are loved ones to be comforted?
John was never comfortable about talking about spiritual things. When asked what he believed I always described his spiritual orientation as backslidden Christian. He believed in that whole thing, sort of, but wanted to do what he wanted to do. Mostly drink beer and smoke cigarettes work hard and raise his kids right. So how does a backslidden Christian raise his children? He exposes them to church, lots of them, if they want. Doesn’t encourage it or discourage it, but makes it clear he is not really into talking about it. He’d heard enough about it already, he would say. Enough to feel judged, unworthy perhaps; but also defiant, resilient, and able to stand on his own two feet.
About a year ago Dad solemnly informed me that he had become an atheist. What???? An atheist at 73? Who does that? There are no atheists in foxholes the liars say who preach a spirituality of cowardice, of toadyism for rank gain, a theology of threats and bribes.
Dad had been watching the Discovery Channel and had heard about the Big Bang and it seemed a lot more reasonable, he informed me. And the Big Bang is a beautiful and wondrous way to understand where we all come from. Condensed to a single point, a place with no dimension, only location. Containing all the matter in the universe. And then bam, everything there is flying apart in all directions, hundreds of millions of years pass and the uniform layer of hydrogen has ripples and perturbations and clumps coalesce and begin burning through nuclear fusion and stars are born and grow the heavy elements and die and explode and the star stuff keeps flying apart. Bigger and bigger.
12 billion years pass and dirt and such collects and spins around a midsized yellow sun on the spiral arm of a typical galaxy that we like to call the Milky Way, and so is born the planet Earth.
It is a beautiful story in its stark simplicity, and the lesson it teaches is the truly grand scope of creation. It has all the more power for being factually undeniably true. You can generate testable hypotheses and learn more about its nature, that is how science advances. In all the creation stories of all the peoples the Actual Truth turned out to be far more vast and far more wonderful. For when John declared his independence from the belief in god he was not rejecting the God Who Made the Universe. He was rejecting some weird little cartoon god he had heard about when he was a kid. A god who rejected all that was fun and demanded the humorless life of a drudge. A god who judged and made one feel small and unworthy.
I took John’s atheism as a step in the right direction. A rejection of something that should be rejected. And the universe is a vast and wondrous place. Currently in my day job I am a substance abuse counselor and I wrestle with helping addicts find a source of spiritual support when drugs and alcohol have taken control of their life. It is no accident that a chapter in the AA Big Book is called “We Agnostics”. Recovery is developing a way of life that is so positive, healthy and fulfilling there is no longer any room for nonsense, and so it becomes an exercise in serenity. And so they say: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
But what of atheists and agnostics, is sobriety denied to them? Not by any means. I have heard a number of workarounds, Good Orderly Direction (G.O.D.), the program, door knobs and file cabinets, anything to reject the toxic selfishness inherent in addiction. I, a little from the outside, as a treatment person not a recovery person, humbly propose the Universe. The universe is sufficient for the serenity prayer and has the advantage of being self-evident to all. ‘For I believe the universe exists for I have seen and heard parts of it. I have tasted of the summer fruit and smelled the coming rain; felt the gentle breeze as it rolls across the plain.”
The serenity prayer neatly divides the universe into two categories and gives us advice on how to deal with both. First, there is everything under our control. And what is under our control? Only our own actions and those we meet with bravery. Everything else, literally everything that is not our own actions are outside of our control, and so we meet everything with acceptance. The intersection of bravery and acceptance is where we find wisdom. And the universe is sufficient for the serenity prayer. It will hold the things we must accept, it is sufficient for serenity. It offers peace in a time of loss. You can say it with me if you want to try it on for size. “Universe grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
So does a belief in the Universe as science understands it preclude a belief in God? Absolutely not. 96% of Americans believe in God and that included Einstein and most scientists. The universe doesn’t compete with God as creator but is the fundamental proof of the scope of creation and that its source must be vast and mighty. For this message is not one of atheism or agnosticism for I am fact am a believer, a passionate dedicated believer in the God Who Made the Universe. This universe, the real one. Personally I believe that like my body has a spirit which animates me the physical universe has a spirit which animates it. But I know what I believe is not what everyone believes and for today I want us all to reach for common ground in which to lift up the spirit of John Trapp in communion and love for remembrance, celebration, and comfort.
For even though he called himself atheist once, Dad told me that Mom was waiting for him. Dad was on a ventilator toward the end and when they took him off and brought him out of sedation, he told me, he had died, and he told me, with assurance, that Mom was waiting for him. I believe him. It is in her character. It is about all I ever saw my mom do. And so it begs the question if Mom was waiting for him where exactly was that? I can honestly say that dad didn’t care and didn’t put much thought into it. I already said he was uncomfortable on matters of the spirit. He was not uncomfortable in contradiction. And neither am I. The truth is too vast the universe too big to not contain many contradictions. I like to believe in a personal god who cares about me. I like to believe in a universe governed by immutable natural laws that can be known and predicted and depended upon. I like to believe in miracles. I like to believe that Mom and Dad still live still love me and care about me, still speak to me with their wisdom. I know they still live in my heart if nowhere else.
John Trapp was a simple man and when I asked him how he wanted to be remembered it was as a Working Man. He worked hard growing up on an organic farm, though in those days they just called them farms. He was born in the heart of the Great Depression and the war years were lean ones on the home front. But the Trapp family was self-sufficient in a way that now we can scarcely understand. He had to churn the butter, pluck the hens, weed the row crops, feed the animals, there are others here who know these stories better than I so I will leave it at that he worked hard even as a small boy. But he played hard too. Fondly remembered tales of hijinks and adventure, messing around with the dogs, sledding, skating, hunting, how he earned his switchings, his sister Alice and her friends holding him down and kissing him.
But mostly he talked about working. Mowing grass, being the first to get a chain saw and cutting down trees. Hiring out as a farm hand, eventually for his sister Norma and her husband Joe. When the season ended he moved to the kill floor, slaughtering beef, hogs, and veal. It was a short trip from there to being a meat cutter. A dollar an hour until the union came and then he moved up to $2.65 cents an hour. Good money in the 50s and he still played hard. Drinking, dancing, roller skating, shuffle board and pool leagues, convertibles and drag racing; mishaps and near escape. Some reckless driving in Monroe that inexplicably ends with him joining the army. Trained as a mechanic he was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall was doing its Berlin Wall thing. There he developed a lifelong love affair with trucks. Most of his army stories though are about baseball or drinking beer. Good local beers with each town its own.
After his time in the service he returned home and to meat cutting, bought himself a brand new 1963 Ford Falcon Convertible, courted and married Frances Eileen Allen. He didn’t care that she had three kids he loved kids and promised to raise them as his own. John still had a little growing up to do but rose to the occasion with his readymade family and tried to be a good father to Bob, Betty and Brenda and three more boys when they came. Dad worked hard and we camped in Lake City in the summers.
Tragedy struck early and hard on this little family when John’s youngest son Dennis drowned in the swimming pool in the backyard. Dad blamed himself as the army had only taught him adult CPR and he later learned it was different for little kids. He drank beer and pitched horseshoes, all four by himself. Eddie Trapp came over and walked with him, no one had anything to say. Dad couldn’t handle family life anymore. He was broken in a way that luckily few of us will ever get to really understand. It was only 7 or 8 years ago that he told me he had finally gotten over Dennis dying. He went on a six month drunk from what I understand I am too young to remember.
He couldn’t stay home and didn’t believe in leaving, John was no coward, so all there was to do was to become a truck driver. He bought a straight truck and started hauling furniture for Beakins Van Lines. He would always point out the parking lot where he learned to drive when we drove through Circle City, as he liked to call it. North America became his home.
He took his first trip and was frightfully lonely. I had the great pleasure of finding and reading some of his letters home to Mom, before moth and rust destroyed, and they were heartfelt and touching. A demonstrative loving side of John I had never seen. On his second trip he threw me up in the cab with him and we were off to see the country. I was three years old. I would stay up all night to help keep him awake and we would talk about everything. I was his confidant, sounding board, and in many ways the repository of his hopes and fears. What an incredible gift to give to a child, your total attention, sharing from your heart. Showing him the country. I am so incredibly blessed I cannot describe. Having such an enriching early childhood in large part shaped who I am today. I was able to learn that people live all kinds of different ways and you can go to places and see stuff.
Dad was a character on the road. He knew this country comprehensively. Everywhere. He gave his own names to the flowers he saw. He knew the phases of the moon and how the stars change overhead with time and distance. He grew to be wise. He learned to instantly make friends. To make the most of a chance encounter. To be real with people. He stayed true to Fran though she had her doubts as she had seen him flirt, a lot. But he stayed true to her in death as he did in life and as easy and convenient it would have been to find another woman to take care of him. Instead he struggled on alone learning how to take care of himself for the first time in his life.
Hauling furniture was hard work. He would work hard all day and drive all night, running hard after the elusive dollar. But he also learned the culture of the truck driver and prided himself on acting as a Professional Driver. Driving safely and courteously, safeguarding fellow travellers, and caring for shared spaces. Looking for opportunities to do someone a good turn. Flashing in trucks when they passed with his running lights a quick flash of thank you when another truck did the same. He was also a friend to hitchhikers and transients, scooping them up giving them honest work and a chance to see the country, starting many in a career.
He helped many a stranded motorist or someone just down on their luck. Early in his career he was the first on the scene when a truck had smashed into a pick up full of migrant workers. There were bodies all over the road the truck driver who caused the accident was weeping and doing nothing. Dad began pulling bodies off the road, living or dead he could not always tell but he had no assurance traffic would stop and it needed to be done. He was a brave man who acted with honor whatever the cost.
Once after he was done with furniture and hauling freight for BJ McAdams he picked up a hitchhiker in spite of the company rule against it because the kid wasn’t wearing shoes. He drove him somewhere, bought him a meal and gave him some money, and didn’t think much of it. Some months later he was tracked down by a private investigator from a fuel slip. The kid had remembered his handle, Trapper John in those days and John was flown in as a surprise witness in a Perry Mason kind of way and exonerated the kid from a bogus charge of armed robbery. Dad did a lot of heroic shit. Stopped rapes, beat men down for disrespecting women and was pulling out his deer rifle out of his truck when the police gunned down a mass killer in a bar he was drinking in. If the cops had been three minutes later John would have taken care of it himself.
He ended his long career, 37 years and well over five million miles driven without a major accident with Anderson Trucking, ATS. Dad loved Harold Anderson, a war hero, truck driver who parlayed his truck and a granite contract into a billion dollar company. He treated John square. They recognized Dad’s excellence and made him a trainer. As racist and sexist as John could be they tried to give him all the women and black folks because he treated people decent and gave everyone a fair shot.
John hauled freight and ATS specialized in specialty loads. A lot of granite and all kinds of big stuff, mining equipment, giant machines, and cranes. It allowed him to be a piece of history. He hauled in granite for the FDR memorial. He hauled scaffolding for crowd control for presidential inaugurations. He hauled a fair chunk of our industrial capacity to the Mexico border and brought back the things we used to make here. He hauled pieces of the space shuttle. He hauled the Disney Parade and towed the Goofy Car in the parade when it wouldn’t start. At the end of his career he specialized in Wind Mills. Technically difficult blades being 150’ long the rear wheels of the trailer were steered by an escort driver. He also loved being part of something good, something for the future. He drove truck until he was 70 about as old a driver as I have ever seen.
Retirement brought some new challenges but also some new joys. He got a little dog he named Myrtle. He had always called his trucks Bessie and his trailers Myrtle and Myrtle followed him around like a little trailer and was a faithful friend when he suddenly for the first time in his life had time on his hands. She was a little dog a chow mix with a leaky heart valve that left her short winded and easily tired. John could relate he was as well by this time. He struggled to pay the bills on a fixed income and could not work his way out of his spending problem like he always could in the past. I made him a deal, I would buy a house if he would come and live with me and help me with the upkeep.
It was a beautiful arrangement that renewed his sense of meaning to his life. Work, that could be done but didn’t need to be done. Perfect for a working man winding down. As my friend Lisa said in a consolation message: “Mike, I’m so sorry about your dad. I know that he has been a huge part of your life these past few years and you will feel his absence every day. You made such a difference to him during these past few years. I could tell that being part of your bustling, friendly household made him feel connected and loved. You took such good care of him.”
As Dad began to decline he began to lose interest in things. It’s a process I’ve seen over and over as people prepare for death. The Tao Te Ching 16th chapter speaks to this and has been a source of strength and guidance for me since my mom was dying:
Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.
Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.
If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kindhearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Path,
you can deal with whatever life brings you,
and when death comes, you are ready.
If you wonder why we had John cremated it’s because he’d be spinning in his coffin as I have decided to end with a song. John had to abandon music when he married a woman who not only was tone deaf but could only make tone deaf children. I sing this not only because it is the only song I have written about John but I wrote it when Mom was dying and it speaks to what I believe about these things.
When your wife is dying in the summer time
The ministers go on vacation
The road workers do their excavation
But the truck driver stays at home
Alone with his regrets
He drinks cheap beer and he frets
About his dying wife and his debts
And if he should have stayed on the road so long.
And when your mom is dying in the summer time
The birds still sing in the morning
The red skies give the sailors warning
But the sad boy does not sail on
Alone with his worst fears
He stifles back his tears
He tries to bring his family cheer
As he writes another sad sad song.
And when someone’s dying in the summer time
People still go to the beach
But happiness is so far out of reach
We just all stay home
And we sit alone together
And talk about the weather
And what’s going to happen to Heather
When her grandma dies before too long.
But the birds still sing when we mourn
And with every death new life is born
We’re all just part of the Goddess anyway
So I’ll wipe away my tears
And learn to face my fears
And know there’s a new part of God to hear me pray
I know there’s a new part of God to hear me pray.
paragraph free zone
I saw a search query that brought someone to my site was what does multiconstruct mean? It took them to a post about baseball and camping and I noticed that a lack of paragraphing can be annoying. Glad people push past that, thank you faithful reader. Nonetheless, I will try to do better. A construct recognizes ways of looking at the world are a created thing. The structure by which we understand anything highlights and obscures aspects of phenomena. Being multiconstruct is embracing many, or even all, ways of looking at the world, like a flies eye it provides multiple view points to shed light and explain. You have to be able to live with a little contradiction is all.
Just back from the market, i said twice that this is my favorite time of year to market in Missouri. The fall stuff is in, the second season of spring crops that they grow in the fall here is here, and the summer stuff is still holding on. Righteous. Johnathon apples, i went with the 8 lb bag and got some egg plants, may do egg plant parmesan. skipped the butternut squash because i had a giant sweet potato.
I also saw lots of people I know and talked to none of them. Its hard for me to deal with the crowd, make all those buying decisions, navigate the crowd with my increasing bulk of packages, and deal with the vendors. Its too much so forgive me if I didn’t say “hi” at the market.
Its blog or mow. Finally getting on the lawn today. Started a bit before Harry came to go to the market. Its been a month but its still not to bad. supposed to be perfect high 60s partly sunny. I have some little okras coming on and the best set of maters all year so i am hoping we still have a good amount of time until the frost.
“punctuation has developed over thousands of years to make our lives easier, to just throw it away isn’t a good idea. no wonder you can type so fast.” “do you use apostraphes when you’re using contractions?” my title has elicited some comment. to reiterate, i mostly blog for fun and do a fair amount of professional writing where i have to paragraph and capitalize and grammar and stuff. blogging i try to get by with less. its easier. but i will try to make some accommodations to usability. “you should drop unnecessary letters too, that would save even more time, all the ones that are silent you should just drop them. and you might consider dropping any letters that are in the bottom row, that would speed up your typing. that’ll be the next phase.” excellent, john. excellent.
Another Friday Night…
Killing time before the Tigers game comes on. I have to work tomorrow so don’t know how deep I’ll be able to get into the game with it not coming on until 9:00. They have a chance to clinch the central division and its nice to end the season strong. I like our chances. Spent some time after dinner weeding the strawberries. They really took it on the chin in the heat wave (probably should have watered them more) and a lot of grass came up in the newly opened space. I especially wanted to get the fox tails, last thing I want is one of this bristles stuck up one of the dog’s nose. Cost my brother like a thousand bucks when it happened to Smokey. Also need to mow, but tired yesterday, and kind of wet today. Got some wild flowers blooming, wish i knew all their names, but the asters by the mail box are especially pretty. Saw more then a few of those in the Nantahalas along with fancy goldenrod, phlox, and a bunch of other stuff i couldn’t ID or can’t remember. There were a lot of these orange pitcher flowers by our second camp site. Even though it wasn’t a legit dispersed site in the National Forest (too close to both a paved road and a picnic area) I was glad we stayed a second night because a beautiful little hummingbird got comfortable enough with us to feed on the orange flowers. It worked its way through the little jungle of them for quite a while. There’s always something magical when they stop by and I am looking to get more flowers in, in front of my picture window and in the back to draw more in. I’ve upgraded to black sunflower seed instead of the cheap mixes and it has drawn a better class of birds. John got me a squirrel guard, a plastic dish that tilts when you put weight on it that has kept out the squirrels and of course the dogs help. Fido has them all running out to the feeder whenever someone opens the back door or yells squirrel. I trimmed up Fido some tonight, straightened up his mustache and got some long spots and some spots that were matted and worked out from his pre-vacation cut. They had been annoying me the whole trip and I was glad to get it done. I had left his little penis hair but it was getting to be better then 2 inches long and John was teasing me so I trimmed that too. He doesn’t care for the manscaping and I can’t blame him after what happened to his balls. I wanted to share more about my vacation but after being back a couple days it already feels far away and long ago. I didn’t take a computer and instead had this great idea of blogging in a book instead. The links are hard but its really revolutionary. I realized I don’t self-censor as much here as much as I thought as my writings for myself weren’t much different, although I would be lying if I said they were exactly the same. Over-sharer that I am I still hold a lot back for the general prevue. I may share some excerpts or use it as a draft maybe this weekend. I have to work a half day tomorrow so no market. I will probably go to Wilsons to get at least some local produce. I was going to wait until Sunday and go to the art/vegetable market at bus station but I want to make barbecued beef and need some sides. Maybe I’ll do carnitas instead and go to the grocery store. its not a bad idea anyway the cupboards are, if not bare, have some room and the fridge is bare. I did make it to the market last Saturday in Franklin North Carolina. It was small but friendly and we got some local tomatoes (not as good as home), a jalapeno, pimento, green beans and okra which livened up our tuna and noodles and our canned chinese food (man that stuff has really gone done hill). We also got a little zucchini bread which was not as good as the ones i get locally (or make for that matter). that would be a good weekend activity, i’ve got a brown banana in the freezer. Franklin was a cool little town though. Caught breakfast twice at the City Diner. Had the Gypsy Omelet which was hash and swiss, pretty yummy and it was cheap. We drove past a place in a strip mall that didn’t have any customers on a weekend and found the City Diner with a lot full of pick up trucks. Pa Miller taught me that was the way to find good eats in the country, god rest his soul. There was also a cool indian mound with some history that it had been an important city of the Cherokee before they got f*cked and they kept the village center on the mound. It was an important battle(the battle of echoe) there where the Cherokee won one year quite handily but got beaten decisively a year later. Would have liked to check out more Cherokee stuff when we were out there, but we stuck to the woods. Looks like its time to call Harry and tell him can’t go to the market and watch a few innings before hitting the hay. Good night faithful reader and sweet dreams.
There and Back Again #2
Well I am home from the Appalachians and it was a really delightful trip. John took some pictures of course. For driving into the remnants of Hurricane Lee we really had OK weather. It rained pretty much nonstop for the first couple of days. We had a break in the rain and hiked the dogs at Locust Cliffs in the Hoosier National Forest on the way down. We considered camping there as we knew we would be driving into more rain but didn’t want to have to deal with wet gear so early in the trip. We stopped and slept in the truck for a bit in a truck stop in KY and drove on into the Great Smokey National Park Labor Day Morning. We got a room for a couple nights at Motel 6 in Sieverville and needing to kill some time before checking in we drove into the park. We had a nice hike at Laurel Falls and then headed back to the room figuring the traffic jam out of the park would have cleared up. It hadn’t and it was a long drive through the hell of Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sieverville. A collection of schlock and tasteless hillbilly nonsense like Branson on steroids. We had the pleasure of that drive several times as we commuted into the park to another really incredible hike and doing a driving trail where we saw a black bear mommy and cub chilling out and feeding in a gum tree. Driving out we hit the Appalachian Trail near Clingman’s Dome so I could add mile 157 for my AT total. After that the rain went intermittent and we moved down and did some camping in the Nantahala National Forest. Hiked in some old growth Poplar/Hemlock, hiked some and hiked some of the AT near Siler Bald that Amee and I had done. It was poignant being back especially being September 7, the 11th anniversary of Mom’s death and that stretch of the AT was where I had come to terms that Mom was going to die. I’ll probably write more about that and some other stuff but I wanted to put up some pictures and give the bare bones narration. We moved to a nicer site where we could have fire over on Bear Pen Mountain and did a couple of waterfall hikes, one named Laurel Falls actually. A couple days there and we drove back over the mountains and caught another nights camping in the Pisgah National Forest. No where near as nice and no hiking at camp but its just great to live outside. After a week of it it just becomes life. Then we drove back enjoying the beautiful scenery of Highway 40 and reminiscing of our childhood trips through the region. Caught a room in Padukah KY and drove home this afternoon. Pleasantly surprised at the yard which is the thing I missed the most. Weeded the strawberries some and enjoyed the wildflowers blooming in the front yard. Not as much as the Nantahala but more than than the Pisquah. I’ll post more on the trip soon.
relaxation
most people i tell about relaxation aren’t trying to relax, they’re wanting relief from anxiety. i tell them its easier to start something positive then stop something negative. stopping being anxious is hard, better to work on cultivating relaxation. unless someone is attached to their anxiety because it meets some other vital need or they gain great benefit from it most people can get significant to total relief pretty quickly with some pretty basic techniques.
if the techniques are easy and actually pretty well known why don’t people get better on their own? mostly its two main mistakes. one is thinking you can make yourself relax and failing at it, a sort of learned helplessness because the act of making runs counter to relaxation. it is instead a process of allowing, akin to going to sleep. still it is an act of the will and so is known as passive volition.
The second pitfall is what inspired this post. “I tried that relation thing when i was feeling anxious and it didn’t help”. of course it didn’t. when you need it is a terrible time to try to learn it. you practice it when you’re already relaxed, before bed or after meds if you use those or a time when you’re already close. ‘seek the lord when he can be found’.
after that its pretty simple. all relaxation techniques involve slowing and deepening the breathing and relaxing the muscles. i like to breathe in my nose and out my mouth slowly and deeply and pay attention to the feeling of air going by my septum. usually i do progressive relaxation tightening muscle groups one by one starting with the toes and then relaxing. noticing how it feels to feel tense. noticing how it feels to feel relaxed. i learned it in a book when i was 16, been doing it off and on ever since. i credit with saving my sanity and perhaps even my life. best migraine treatment i’ve tried, even the pills that dissolve under your tongue and give you a three day hangover.
for anxiety you add in self talk. think about what you would say to a friend who felt that way. its ok, just breathe, its going to be ok, anxiety is just a feeling and feelings can’t hurt me. and scaling, numbering it between 1 & 10 like the pain scale and working your way down one point at a time. makes it concrete and feel more manageable to name it. especially something so prosaic as a 6. learn to be aware and catch it earlier if possible. learn that you can live with a four. we all get anxious some time. it is a dangerous and uncertain world.
anxiety is like the warning light on your dash board. it tells us something is wrong and we need to be aware and take some action. taking a pill is like putting a piece of black electrical tape over the light. it doesn’t address the issue. if you worry over the bills and drink or take a pill it doesn’t pay the bills.
you have to take some action. setting goals keeps us targeted and allows us to tolerate greater discomfort as we work for better things. visualization can help. i like to imagine tension as a darkness flowing out of me. i like to breathe in flexibility and breathe out tension. sometimes its as simple as working the tension out of my shoulders.
the emotions are not directly controllable so we have to push them indirectly through our thoughts, or our bodies, or our actions. exercise is great as well. it uses the same energy to be anxious that get used up by exercise or hard physical labor.
anger can be managed the same way, stress as well. if you breakdown the symptoms they all look pretty similar.
Multiconstruct 
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