Knackered Anticipates the Worst with Benzos

   Hey there, Knackered here.  Christmas of 1999 was indeed a scary time.  No, I wasn’t afraid that Santa wouldn’t show or that the relatives would, but if your memory serves you well, the world was supposed to end on New Year’s Eve.  That’s right, when the ball in Times Square bottomed out, the world as we knew it was a goner.

   If you partied too hard, you might have gone into that good night feeling like it truly had.  But for the population at large, technological annihilation was on the calendar.  Conjecture had it that the banks would go bonkers, credit cards would be obsolete and the apocalypse was likely by morning.  It was the Millennium for god’s sake!

   I can remember going to a staff party where the lot of us, drinks in hand, spent a good deal of the time looking into the survival stash that occupied one section of our host’s home. We wondered and worried if each of us had enough put away to survive the impending doom.

   Of course, to my memory, none of that stuff actually happened and the next thing we knew, we were all tired and wasted when we had to go back to work Monday morning.

   Most of my generalized anxiety problems, other than the Benzo thing, of course, have been anticipatory in nature.  During college I knew I was going to flunk out, get drafted, and be sent to what is now one of the world’s tourist centers. Namely, southeast Asia.

   But after I said goodbye to the U and threw my cap in the air,  some very lame Republican toadies of Richard Nixon’s got caught burglarizing a place called called Watergate.  That was the end of the war, the draft and Nixon’s reign as POTUS.  Nobody could ever have anticipated that one coming.

   Fact be known, none of the things that I fretted over ever occurred.  I’ve now been at the business of life for over seventy years and finally realized I don’t have a goose’s notion of what is right around the corner.  The sad fact is, I’ve arrived at the point where it’s a waste of time to even think about such things.

   These days, I’m much too concerned as to whether or not I’ll be able to eat dinner, walk my dog without crashing along the way and get through my next Dr. appointment without going postal when it’s suggested that ‘we speed things along’ and finish this whole Benzo thing.  The same can be said for the ‘add on drugs’ they insist will help. Tried that, been there, not again.

   If we can draw on past events and experiences that will allow us move on with confidence, we’re using something called wisdom.  Wisdom is good stuff.  You don’t have be ‘long in the tooth’ to have that kind of thing.  After you’ve beat your head against the wall once or twice over something, going on like that is not going to serve you well in the future. Trying to conjure up what may happen wastes too much time in the present of what is really going on right now. One of life’s great philosophers, Lao Tzu said it best, “Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.” Words to live by.