Jed Wolf

“How is it possible for today to be so much better than yesterday,” I wondered this morning delivering Agave pups from my front yard to my elderly neighbor. 

When we first moved to Florida, Sally appeared ancient on the other side of our shared fence. Now in her mid-seventies, “she looks younger than me,” I thought fluttering my eyes behind my closed eyelids. “How are you feeling,” she asked. 

It’s hard to make small talk when everyone knows you’ve had a heart attack. “Fine,” would’ve be a lie, so not knowing what would come out, after beginning with, “Well…” Sally interrupted my weakened stream of consciousness and told me I sounded just like her dead husband. 

“Gary had almost as many stents as you, but at a certain point there was just no more room,” she said unwittingly like Betty White on “The Golden Girls.” “Well,” I thought leaning on my shovel awaiting a punch line, but when she simply said he’d made it to seventy, I looked at her garden bed as my eyeballs scanned left to right and my eyelids blinked wildly. 

EMDR stands for rapid Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. The psychologist Francine Shapiro invented EMDR in the 1980s when she noticed that moving her eyes from side to side seemed to reduce the occurrence of her own distressing memories. Later, she theorized that trauma causes negative emotions to be stored within the same memory network as a troubling event. 
After a lifetime of pitting my will against my demons or inviting them to brunch, I still stagger through life like a professional dog walker with anxieties of all shapes and sizes tugging me along. Since my time bomb’s unrelenting tick, I’d rather consider a high bridge than seek more therapy. Instead of visualizing myself serenely accepting reality’s latest slap in the face, I bought a used Lazy Boy and a trial subscription to Hulu so I was a prime candidate for rapid eye movement to address my future. 
Imagining the very worst fate imaginable, i.e. the rest of my life in a recliner, staring out a window like a lonely six year old, I close my eyes and rapidly looked left and right until it hurt in an attempt to reprogram my Amigdala, the almond shaped structure at my brain’s core associated with emotions. I felt my cheek smushed against glass and pathetic tears no one ever noticed and decided not to spend another minute of my semi-precious life like that. “Life is the most unsatisfying thing imaginable,” I thought like Mic Jagger as my eye muscles spasmed from overuse.

I opened my eyes with a fresh image seared in my memory banks realizing EMDR works. I was able to reprogram my mind! Though satisfaction never comes up when I live life in the present, rather than accepting medical limitations, my ability to rearrange influencing thoughts would create a road forward!

Predictably, I was reminded of the kind of ruts I experienced in mud season in Northern Vermont. Driving along back roads for decades, I’d learned to avoid concealed traps within long reflective puddles which swallowed even the most audacious four-wheel drivers. Experience taught me to extremely cautious straddling them as greasy mud had sucking tendencies.
“Who am I to think Sally’s remark was any different,” I wondered replacing my thoughts while fluttering my eyes wildly searching for something other than myself to throw into the rut for traction. Imagining how she’d feel lying in the mud, I said, “So that gives me about twenty-five more years?” 
“Please forgive me,” Sally pleaded, admitting she’d been lately blurting out things without thinking and was concerned about losing her own marbles. I gave her a hug, told her not to worry. “It was exactly what my Amigdala needed to hear.” “What,” she asked. “Never mind, I said giving her another hug then turned toward home fluttering my eyes, telling myself I was forty one.