The Anxiety of Life's Wild Ride
How to Escape the Angst of Life's Inevitable Dynamism (Vol. 5; Issue 20)
Like a poisoned-tipped arrow piercing your skin, anxiety can suddenly flood your personal experience. The milder forms are almost universal: Will I have enough money to make my car payment this month? Will my high school friends think me nerdy for taking AP calculus? Will the bird flu become a pandemic?
More serious forms of anxiety can be crippling. Approximately 15 percent of the adult population suffers from social anxiety. They fear judgment, worry excessively about social encounters, and struggle to make eye contact. Surprisingly, about 10 percent have panic attacks, which cause them to suddenly fear losing control or feel a sense of impending doom. Physical symptoms include trembling, rapid heartbeat, chest pain and dizziness.
Like most psychophysiological phenomena, anxiety exists along a spectrum. Most people feel some anxiety on a daily basis. It tends to be, as noted, fairly benign. Is my boss summoning me because I’m going to be fired? Will my partner be angry because I spent $500 on a winter coat? At the other end of the continuum are myriad, albeit less common, frights: fear of flying, fear of snakes or spiders, or fear of needles, or the panic attacks just described.
It is difficult to find a common factor uniting these various disquieting experiences. They involve the mind-body complex. Nonetheless, and if viewed from a purely phenomenological* perspective, anxiety prone individuals (including yours truly) fear:
THE NORMAL UNFOLDING OF TIME.
And in response, they secretly wish for:
THE CESSATION OF TIME!
Consider, for example, a few of the illustrations noted above. I owe $623 on my Honda every month. I’m not quite sure I’ll have enough left to make the payment. But the fact is that, well:
I either will or I won’t.
And, if I won’t, I will either beg, borrow, or steal to get the money. Or, if I miss several payments, the car will be repossessed. In a sense, then, I need time to stop. If it stopped, I would have more time to deal with the problem. Because it never stops, I anxiously imagine all the possibilities that might occur as it passes.
If I fearfully await the results of a liver biopsy, I, too, would fill the typical 7-to-10-day waiting period with fantasies of liver cancer, cirrhosis, or another dreaded disease. I might wish time could rewind to the period before I had whatever symptoms led to the biopsy; I might wish that time would race forward so I would know the results now. The results may be good, bad, or inconclusive. Once I get them, I will have the information needed to make next steps. But, in truth, I can do nothing but wait in the interim.
It seems inarguable that we human beings ride on what Isaac Newton (1687/2004) called the “arrow of time.” Centuries before him, the Roman poet Ovid wrote:
Time itself glides on with constant motion, ever as a flowing river.
It goes without saying, of course, that time flowing also creates anxiety because our lives will end—for every single one of us. In the realm of existential philosophy, that discomfort is part of existential anxiety. Time’s passage is part of our “existence.” On some constant level, then, we fear the the finitude of our lives. The French poet, filmmaker, and friend of Picasso, Jean Cocteau (1967), famously said:
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.
I often cite this passage from Cocteau because he poetically captures how many intoxicants reduce or eliminate such anxieties. However, Cocteau, an obvious fan of opium (easily available in his era), fails to mention that the train remains in motion while intoxicated. Opium or its equivalents offer the impression you are off the train, but disembarking is not an option. Therefore:
We humans must navigate our journey on time’s waterways in some way.
We now reach the point at which neither science nor any one person can answer. Coping with time’s passage is each individual’s problem. Suggestions can be made, but each person must find their own way. As noted, many people who suffer from high levels of anxiety wish to stop time. Or, they may want to reverse it or speed it up. Regardless of these fantastic wishes, it just ambles along.
Many cultural traditions offer approaches to managing time-passing-anxiety from the existential to the extreme. Interestingly, and at the risk of contradicting the “each individual’s problem” phrase, they seem to coalesce around living each moment as fully as possible, and being curious about what comes next.
Eastern traditions ranging from Taoism to Buddhism preach:
BE HERE NOW.**
Meditation and other mindfulness practices invite us into the present moment. They suggest engaging the senses as a way to bring attention to the here-and-now: Eat slowly and taste your food; look around you and notice the trees, buildings, and clouds. These traditions also suggest avoiding routine, e.g., taking a different route to work every day, as a way of bonding with the moment.
Western religious traditions suggest prayer, devotion, or losing oneself in meaningful activity (see Csikszentmihalyi’s 2008 book on optimizing “flow”). The Christian’s goal is to live in the now, to experience each moment as a transcendent gift. God tells Moses, “I Am Who Am” – which can be translated I Am Now as well as I Am Being Itself. Christian theologian Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1861/2009) writes:
The present moment is always full of infinite treasures; it contains more than you are capable of receiving.
I mean, ain’t it true? The human brain functions as a dis-information system because of the intensity of external and internal stimuli it receives by the nanosecond. The tastes, smells, sounds, sights, and sensuality of each moment; the thoughts, memories, and feelings. How could de Caussade be wrong? And yet we run from perceiving such riches because, it seems, we fear being. Alcohol and drug abuse numbs. So does doom scrolling. So do the necks craned to cell phones, the eyes glaring at computer screens, and the twitchy hands manipulating gaming controllers.
Obviously, none of these distractions stop the flow of time. It is unstoppable. Successful journeying along the river of time is challenging—to say the least. It requires a kind of expedition in and of itself. None of the be here now methods just mentioned, East or West, are easy. But, for sure, efforts to stop time’s flow ironically create anxiety. The road to tranquility, however twisted and tortuous, lies in giving up such endeavors and finding ways, however you can, to drink up the sensuality of each moment.
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*Phenomenology, a philosophy embraced by scholars like Edmund Husserl (1931/2017) and Martin Heidegger (1953/2010), seeks to isolate and investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience. Phenomenology attempts to describe universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world. In brief, it focuses on “phenomena as they appear” or “the significance of lived experience.”
**See Baba Ram Dass’ book of this title below.
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References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper.
Cocteau, J. (1967). The Difficulty of Being. Trans. E. Sprigge. New York: Coward-McCann.
De Caussade, J-P. (1861/2009) The Sacrament of the Present Moment. Trans. by E.J. MacMahon. New York: HarperOne.
Heidegger, M. (1953/2010). Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Husserl, E. (1931/2017). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. New York: Martino Books.
Newton, I. (1687/2004). The Principia: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. New York: Fingerprint Publishing.
Ram Dass, B. (1978). Be Here Now. New York: Harmony.