I’ve thought about my last entry about giving up childhood fears. I don’t think the goal is to give up childhood fears. The goal is to give up the addictive thinking that those fears produce. I suspect we all have that addictive thinking. Here’s what I mean.

As I described a couple of days ago, I get anxious about air travel. Not the air travel itself, but all that precedes sitting my butt in my assigned seat. The thought of being 35,000 feet in the air, traveling at 600 mph, in temperatures of 30 below does not bother me. Because it is completely outside my jurisdiction. Everything before that, beginning with deciding to buy a ticket, all the way up to sitting in 23B, that’s the anxiety part for me.

Sad motherI think this goes WAY back for me. Young children sense things long before they understand things. They develop their own kind of reasoning long before they have conscious thoughts about the events around them. My early sense was that I had to make sure my mother was OK. It seemed my job to make sure she was not upset, overwhelmed, sad, or anything that might cause her to walk out of the room and never come back, or to fall into a heap and not be OK anymore.

But of course she was upset and overwhelmed. She had too many sons too early! She had a husband who was married to the church! She had too much to do and not enough time, and she was in her 20s! And she was frequently sick. And of course she was sad. Her father had died the year before I was born.

All of that is to say, she had a lot going on that I didn’t know or understand. I was a kid. Knowing and understanding those kinds of things was above my pay grade and maturity level. But I felt it, and I thought I needed to do something to make sure she was OK, because only if she was OK would I be OK as well.

So what’s a kid to do? You become compliant, a peacemaker, a pleaser. You try not to disappoint or inconvenience people. You act responsible, you feel responsible, sometimes for things way out of you area. You show up, you avoid looking foolish, and you avoid conflict. OK, maybe YOU don’t do all those things, but I did. And still do.

And those things create addictive ways of thinking and interacting. Like everyone else, my way of thinking and interacting seemed completely normal to me, and it took me years to realize not everyone thinks, feels, or views things the way I do. My way is just as unique and just as crazy as everyone else’s. Fortunately, most of us fall within a tolerable norm so that our unique brand of crazy doesn’t stand out too much.

All of this is to say that during Lent, a time of reflection and mindfulness, one of the things I am paying attention to is my own brand of crazy, my own addictive way of looking at the world and at others. I have to recognize my addictive thinking, own it, and confess it before I can make a clear choice to do things differently. That’s what this season is about for me.