Therapy Train

“Therapy is expensive; popping bubble wrap is cheap! You choose.”
(Unknown)

I love quotes. I thought the above one was not only amusing but also ridiculously true. Really, how many of you have actually felt some sort of strange release by popping bubble wrap. There is something cathartic about it. I am not in any way diminishing the merit of professional therapy when it is truly needed. However, I think that there are many cases where we should be able to help one another. That’s what truly living in community is about, but most of us don’t make the time or don’t take the time to really help others. And we don’t take the time to help ourselves. We let the every day stresses of life get to be too much.

This morning I woke up about an hour before the alarm went off. There were so many thoughts swirling around in my head, any number of them threatening to take away any peace that the previous night’s sleep had brought. I thought about waking Chris up to talk to him about it, and I thought about praying. But mostly what I did was lie awake and worry. How foolish! At 5:30 Chris and I were on our morning walk when I told him about this, and he gently reprimanded me for not waking him just as I reprimanded him the other night when he awoke with a horrendous migraine and neglected to wake me so that I could take care of him. Either of us would gladly forgo any amount of sleep in order to help the other.

So I started thinking of other things that are therapeutic without the hefty price tag. I’m not talking about things to do in order to escape from life; I mean things that really are progressive and helpful. Of course talking to a loved one, a friend, is at the top of that list. Exercising, painting, writing, and praying: these are all good. Are there other ones? I guess the point I like best in the quote above is that it’s your choice. We don’t have to stay in despair or even in a bad mood.

The story below has nothing to do with therapy; it’s just something that has been on my mind for the last couple days. I didn’t want to wait to write about it later. So, here it is….

When I was in college I used to sit on my friend Margaret’s back porch and listen to trains in the distance and wonder who might me on them. I guess we don’t really have many passenger trains, but people do still “jump” trains. Several of my friends told me during college that they had snuck on trains and ridden for hours or days just to see where it would take them. I can sit on my own balcony now and listen to the trains that travel by on the tracks that are quite close by. There’s something exciting and romantic while also remaining dark and mysterious about trains to me. It appeals to my imagination, and I can go far in that. One night while Chris and I were still just dating we had gone on a particularly long walk and chose to cross some trains tracks on the way home. We ended up walking on the tracks for a while until we heard a train coming behind us quite a ways off. While it was far away, it was not far enough for us to make it to the next road, and there was really nowhere to go to get away from the tracks. On either side of the tracks were deep ditches. We stepped off to one side and sat on the gravelly slope while the train raced by just a few feet behind us. It was an exhilarating and terrifying experience. Opposing thoughts and feelings combated in my mind: pictures of overturned trains that I had seen, the four boys in Stand By Me trying to outrun the train on the bridge, the image of the something being slung from between the wheels and the tracks and gashing me in the head or worse like in Final Destination, the song “Nothing Like a Train” by my favorite band Vigilantes of Love, the thrill of wind on my back, the roar of the wheels against the track, the steady pressure of Chris’s hand against my own, the question of what made me decide to walk down the tracks in the first place, and the hope that soon I would be happily strolling back to my home. I made it, and now I love trains even more.

Here comes another train now....