Rebecca arrived in Timisoara last Thursday and you see her below focused – oh, how focused she gets – learning Romanian on Duolingo. She has been working on this Latin language for several months and has moved through basic, first and second levels into level three on prepositions. Me? Well, read on.

Fortunately, West University at Timisoara is offering a Beginning Romanian course and is generously allowing us to take the class, 6 – 7:30 PM on Thursday and Fridays. We have a phenomenal language teacher who gently chastised Rebecca and I last Friday because she wasn’t sure we were following along on our phones. Did she think we were checking our emails? Since I had not been on this side of the classroom since 1982, this was yet another new experience or, as they say in Romania, o altă experiență nouă.

Last Thursday afternoon a few hours after Rebecca arrived we were walking in a light rain to West University to our first language class. We turned to each other and said, almost in unison, ‘can you believe we are doing this?’ I am sure we said something similar in January 2018 soon after we arrived in Malta to begin our work directing Luther College’s Malta program. For me, there is a kind of terror beneath this question as well as confidence slowly built up over the years, from doing what I did not think I could do. Terror & confidence, what Jung called the tension of opposites.

Somehow I have learned to live with this tension. What does this mean, to live with the tension between negative and positive feelings or the thoughts that produce these feelings? The first week in Romania my mind sent me unbidden questions, such as ‘what if I lost my glasses? or ‘what if the security guard roaming Kaufland’s supermarket stopped me to ask what is in my backpack and because I never finished the basic level of Romanian on Duolingo all I can say is ‘nu știu limbo română?’ The ‘what ifs’ came fast and furious followed inevitably by a tightening in my stomach, which I have come to recognize as my amygdala firing off warning signals. A sense of panic lie just below the surface of my consciousness.

What do you do with anxiety? Or with the negative thoughts that trigger anxious feelings? Distraction can work, for a short time. However, old thoughts come back or new ones appear, as in yesterday I heard from a West University colleague that a university employee had been exposed to COVID – 19 and was staying home from work, but surely there are others and ‘what if…?’

Or you can argue with the thoughts or feelings, as in ‘I shouldn’t feel this way’ or ‘I shouldn’t be afraid’ or ‘Timisoara has 300,000 people and ‘I am unlikely to come in contact with the few who have been exposed.’ Arguing with your mind is arguing with an opponent who is constantly changing shape. You can’t win. Your mind will manufacture counter-argument after counter-argument.

Or you can give in to anxious feelings and stop doing something that brings on anxiety. I know many people who don’t do something they want to do because of anxious feelings. Their lives are constricted. Truth be told, learning a different language was never easy for me and so my mind during my Romanian Duolingo lessons in Decorah was always chattering away usually with the message of ‘you can’t do this.’ So I eventually stopped. When the opportunity to take this Romanian course in Timisoara came along, Rebecca needed to push me. None of what I say below has worked perfectly for me and it won’t for you. But if you are someone who is not doing something you want to do because of anxious thoughts and feelings read on. There is help out there and scientifically proven paths forward. (Please feel free to contact me for additional sources and perhaps some sharing of my own struggles with anxiety that might be useful to you.)

Over the years I have learned a few valuable skills to help me deal with anxious thoughts and feelings. In this blog I will write about my experience with the skill of meditation and describe other skills in future blogs. Investigating the skill of meditation made sense to me once I learned the profound insight that I cannot control my thoughts and feelings. They are unruly, come out of nowhere, and rarely last very long. If you are someone who is burdened by unwanted thoughts and feelings, two books that have been helpful to me are The Worry Trap by Chad LeJeune and Stopping the Noise in Your Head by Reid Wilson.

I started meditating a few years ago, about 10 minutes a day, the kind of mediation where I focus on in-and-out breaths while observing my mind and body at work. After just a few sessions I learned how active especially my mind was, with thoughts coming and going, like planes landing and taking-off at a busy airport. Slowly I came to accept how dynamic this mind and body-work is and thus to fear less any one particular thought or feeling.

Meditation is a skill that easily can become a habit. It is perfect for a perfectionist like me because the point of my little meditation practice is to simply observe my mind and body. I am not trying to change anything but the simple act of observing has gradually taken the scariness out of my thoughts and feelings. This makes it easier to accept the panic I felt during the first weeks in Romania, even to welcome it, and bring it along with me as I do what it is I am supposed to be doing here. A really good book on both the science of meditation and some useful ‘how to’s’ is Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True.

The cognitive insight that one cannot control thoughts and feelings along with the behavioral work of observing this unruly mind and body armors one against the inevitable negative thoughts and feelings that come naturally in this imperfect world we live in.

This insight and the skill of meditation don’t cure COVID – 19 or calm the Stock Market or persuade one’s political adversary or help us learn Romanian but together they are an antidote to the inevitable vicissitudes of the world, wherever you are.