This essay,
The Anxiety Of Being,
is the companion piece to
Something's Wrong.
Most everyone, especially
people
of good will everywhere, regard life as a great experience. We expect
it to be great. We assume it's going to be great. We want the best life
has to offer, and we want the best life has to offer not just for
ourselves, but for all
people.
Indeed, we want the best life has to offer for
Life itself
(I'll include
myself
in this group). At some point, my take on this notion changed. I
gradually realized (actually it was more like "At some point, I
suddenly realized") that that may be a very
naïve notion of life. As much as I would like life to be great for
everyone everywhere always, what's probably a more realistic
view of life
is there's always something unwanted, always something unexpected
intruding into our
equanimity
and interrupting our reverie.
If it's not this, then it's that. If it's not Covid, then it's AI. If
it's not AI, then it's war. If it's not war, then it's climate change.
There's always something. And what goeswith (as
Alan Watts
may have said) this realization, is that all my expectations that life
will (indeed, should) always be great, are fundamentally
flawed ... and ... even though my expectations of life may
be fundamentally flawed, there really is
nothing
wrong
with them, and neither is there anything fundamentally wrong with life
not always being great. Actually, that's just
the way
it is, and we weren't ever promised life would be any other way. We
were never promised life would always be gift-wrapped with pretty bows
and ribbons. It's us who allowed our hopeful expectations
to supersede reality. That's what's realistic. That's
what happens.
There's
nothing wrong
with shark attacks. They
happen.
And we weren't ever promised they would be any other way.
Now, after some due
consideration,
I have two
observationsworth
making. One, while my tendency ie my thrown-ness is to
berate such intrusions into my
equanimity
as somehow wrong, they're not intrinsically, absolutely,
incontrovertibly wrong. "Wrong" is something I apply. As hard as it
sometimes is to get this, "wrong" is really little more than my
opinion.
And two, if I intend to somehow transform the quality of
my life,
I won't make it
happen
by making what
happens
wrong, and then aspiring to change what's wrong. We've been trying to
do that for hundreds of years, and look where we are now: we've barely
left square one. Instead it will
happen
when I 'fess up to that whatever I
consider
to be "wrong" is my
opinion,
my judgement,
my context.
That is where "wrong" occurs. The thing in itself is never wrong. It
just occurs that way to us. It's when we're anxious that
it's most likely that things will occur as wrong.
What's so
is that
being human
comes with a certain anxiety. And here's the thing: the anxiety isn't a
design flaw. It's not misplaced. It's not an error. We're inherently
anxious about being. It's built in to
the machinery.
It literally keeps us alert,
awake,
on guard,
and
alive.
When we're anxious, it's an alarm bell, it's a warning, it's a
cautionary tone. And the thing not to do with it, is to
make it wrong and disable the alarm. The way to handle anxiety is to
create
a context
for it, to own it,
to take responsibility for
it.
That's when whatever we're anxious about, has the space to
transform - by itself.
Resisting
it is
futile.
This is something to
consider:
don't expend any more energy on changing what makes you anxious.
Instead, transform the anxiety.
Recontextualize
it (I
love
that
word).
Once I got that anxiety isn't something to
resist
or change, I began to see its place and purpose in our lives as
human beings.
We literally could not function without it. Its automaticity is a
timely warning system which informs the survival of the species. The
anxiety of being, is not
personal.