The defining emotion of my early childhood was fear. My first memory is a recurring nightmare I had where a Lou Ferrigno-style Hulk burst out of my closet and terrorized me.
As an adult, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Looking back, I have probably had an anxiety disorder since I was a very young child. I was afraid of everything and in an often debilitating state of panic. I was the child who was too sensitive and overreacted to everything.
What the adults in my life didn’t know was that I felt everything deeply — fear and pain, but also joy and love.
I seemed to grow out of my fearful stage as a teen, but really, I had just learned to mask my anxieties behind humor and swagger.
The work of my adult life has been to learn how to live a fulfilling life in a world built to torment me. I have never found medications to be a helpful intervention for me. Everyone is different, and I know that for many people with mental health challenges, including my children, medications are a life-saving intervention. But my doctors and I could never land on the right combination. Instead, I have worked with therapists to build coping mechanisms and design my life to allow me to flourish in a world not set up for me.
There is a beautiful flipside to anxiety and ADHD. I have a phenomenal imagination and ability to work in stretches of hyper-focused work, so long as I also create space to rest and wander.
It’s not just my mind that needs to wander. Every day, I take long walks, usually in nature. Hiking alongside the Willamette River is one of my favorite pastimes. During these walks, I practice mindfulness by noticing what I notice. One of the things I notice most often is the movements of geese.
Twice a year, our Willamette River Valley sky is filled with the honking and flying chevrons of skeins of Canada geese on their migratory journey.
On their way to warmer climes, the geese seem to be pulling winter behind them, ushering in the end of fall and the beginning of the long, dark, and wet winters Western Oregon is so famous for.
Our valley has plenty of friendly waterways and large fields where these flying communities can find food and rest on their northern and southern passages. These geese are tourists, not permanent residents.
Tracking their biannual passages helps me stay connected to the rhythms of nature, helping me keep my focus on the present moment and the current happenings instead of spending too much time lost in anxious memories or anxious projections.
Watching the geese also gives me a sense of my role in my community. Am I a member of the flock, or am I more like one of the local birds, curious about the visitors and eager for them to get out of my space?
The geese don’t always huddle together in large flocks. Often, a handful of them will break from the rest and land in a small pond. Even after having seen thousands of Canada geese over the decades, it’s always stunning to see one make a water landing. They seem to attack the water, coming in too fast, only to make the most graceful landing imaginable.
Nature is truly the most skilled engineer imaginable.
Because the geese are not always here, it’s sometimes easier to be in awe of their abilities and majesty than it is of the ducks that live here year-round.
It’s that feeling of awe and wonder that I’m chasing. Wonder is what makes me feel most human and most connected to nature. Awe is what allows me to stay grounded in this moment.
The geese are my guides to mindfulness. They come in the fall and spring to reproach me for my discordant lifestyle filled with screentime and worry. These harbingers of the extreme seasons, summer and winter, are my prophets. Their formations signal I need to repent and reset.
My greatest sin is forgetting to be grateful for the magic of the small moments of each day.
The geese have many lessons to teach, lessons I’m eager to learn and relearn because the geese teach without ego. The geese are prophets who never preach. Their actions are the message.
I cannot help but stop when I hear or see the geese in flight. More often than not, I find myself grabbing my notebook to write a haiku or observation about the geese.
Their very presence pulls me out of my mind and into the real world where life is happening. To the extent that I have learned to live in the moment and to have any kind of effective mindfulness practice, it is because of the geese.
Just like the arrival of Christmas triggers some to be more gentle and kind, or the start of spring baseball pushes others to go outside and smile, the seasonal migrations of the geese are my holiday reminder to be my best self.
Because, at my core, I am a storyteller, I often create fables and parables about the geese. I get wrapped up in their dramas and love to personify these animals and imagine they have rich interior lives.
But I have never seen an anxious wild goose. They simply live. A goose eats when hungry, drinks when thirsty, takes to the sky when it’s time, and lands when the skein is ready to rest.
The goose takes no thought for tomorrow and doesn’t waste a second worrying about what happened yesterday.
The fall is often when my anxiety reaches its nadir. The few weeks these beautiful beasts spend passing through coincide with my greatest need for help.
And as much as I love making up stories about the geese and writing little poems about their journey, I mostly just need a reminder that life flows.
Tomorrow, the geese will be in a different field, on a different part of the river, or another body of water altogether.
Tomorrow, my life will also have moved on. I may still be in the same physical place, but metaphysically, the river of life will have kept flowing. I only have today to savor this moment.
Fear was the defining emotion of my childhood. But contentment is the lodestar of my middle age.
Each day, I do my work, like the geese fly their routes, and once work is done, I rest and release my thoughts, like the geese coming in for a landing.
And when I forget to live content in the moment, as I often do, the geese come back and remind me that the world is filled with wonder, and it is my duty to stand in awe of nature.
You cannot live in doubt or fear when you watch a skein of geese, silhouetted by a full moon, pass across the Cascades.
All you can do is breathe and be.
This post was first published on Medium.
Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist and best-selling author. His most recent book is “How to Create a Life You Love.” If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love his newsletter, which features both email and physical mail, where he uses poetry, comics, and illustrated essays to explore nature, creativity, mindfulness, and living a fully human life.