Some of us are worriers. Some not so much. The tendency to worry feels sort of hard-wired. It’s a type of energy. Hardcore worriers truly believe that worrying (imagining what might go wrong in the future) will protect them from harm. That’s the drill. Look ahead with fear so that you can head off what you don’t want to happen at the pass.
Except that doesn’t work because we don’t know what’s going to happen. Making stuff up about what could possibly go wrong based on fear separates us from ourselves, from our power to experience and respond to what is happening.
Fear is as natural as breathing. Fear helps to protect us when there are genuine threats to our wellbeing that we want to avoid. Problems arise when the threats are imaginary. Imaginary threats obscure the present.
There is a spectrum of worry that goes from rational to irrational.
I’m almost of gas and the next gas station is x miles away… will I make it? It’s nerve-wracking. I hope I make it.
I texted someone five minutes ago and they haven’t answered yet. Do they hate me? Did I say something horribly wrong? How can I get anything done when I am consumed with worry about what that person thinks of me?
Imaginary threats cause real harm
What I’m trying to figure out is how I can get anything done when I am feeling fear and disgust in my body at the cruel, destructive, senseless words and actions of so many people who are using their power to cause great pain and suffering. I am shocked at the brutal treatment of random people targeted not because they are criminals, but because they are the scapegoat demographic du jour. They are imaginary threats being actually harmed.
The scope of imaginary threats seems to be growing all the time. Some of the recent rhetoric I’ve heard takes ‘othering’ to such a high, wide, and violent pitch that my heart aches.
Even though I’m in a fairly safe demographic (at the moment), personal fear is part of my unease… could these awful people do awful things to me? Could they drag me out of my house with no warning or due process and send me to the gulag?
Mostly I feel sadness and revulsion that human beings can be so stupid and sadistic. How do I react to this? What is my responsibility? What can I do? How do I allow myself to see and feel the horror of what is happening, not just in the United States, but in many parts of the world, without being overwhelmed to the point of inaction (aka hiding under the covers)?
Human acts of good and evil are as old as humanity
I’m not kidding myself that the United States of America hasn’t always been replete with greed, corruption, arrogance, aggression and subjugation, among other qualities, fine and not so fine. It’s been replete with humans. Humans, apparently, have a far greater range of possible behaviors than most of the natural world.
Together with the break from tradition that the ‘new’ world facilitated, and the diversity of people who came here, this country has given rise to great innovation, great creativity, great courage, and a great expansion of knowledge and awareness as well as nothing-new-under-the-sun acts of self-protection and self-aggrandizement at the expense of others’ wellbeing.
However you parse it, our democracy has always been an experiment. For 250 years this well-designed system of government with checks and balances has skipped down the passage of time holding hands with capitalist amorality (the pursuit of happiness, baby!). How’s that working out?
A well-designed system is one that can absorb and respond to change, to the imperatives of reality, which includes the reality of human nature, fear and all.
Checks and balances only work when there is enough basic agreement amongst the players that the game is worth it. No human-made system can be so well-designed that it is protected from an effort to destroy it.
What we are witnessing
Right now the people in power are reacting to imaginary threats. They create and promote imaginary threats to get what they want (they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs!), and they genuinely feel threatened by everything that is not part of their story about who they are and what matters.
We are witnessing the volatile mixture of power and fear that triggers violence. The more things change the more fear/resistance arises from what doesn’t want to change, from what fears change.
The magical thinking that posits ‘going back’ to some mythic better time is a dead-end. We are never going to Make America Great Again. The trouble with this slogan is not only the word ‘again,’ it’s the word ‘make,’ which in this case does not mean create, it means force.
The real question facing us (the human race) is: will we gain enough understanding of who and what we are, and our role as stewards of this planet, to repair and heal the damage we have done so far in our evolutionary journey?
The cosmic battle is not between right and left, conservative and liberal, woke and comatose; it’s between maturity and immaturity, humility and arrogance, love and fear. It’s between accepting and working with the mystery and reality of life or trying to defeat and control it—an unattainable goal.
The best we can hope for is that there will be enough of us willing to commit to a vision of what is real and sustainable that we will be willing to create systems that facilitate what is real and sustainable.
Is worrying necessary?
There is a difference between worrying and feeling. Deeply felt emotions do not obscure the present. Often they are the key to the present. Interacting with the present is a whole body experience. In the absence of self-repression (good luck with that…) the body feels what it feels.
It’s the stories we make up to handle our emotions that obscure the present, sending us down rabbit holes into a wanderland of blame and shame.
How do I balance awareness, emotion, action?
What is the most constructive balance I can strike between being aware, with feeling, of so much suffering in the world, and the interior strength to follow, without fear, my deepest intuitions of what I have to give and what I want to give?
There is no general answer to this question, only individual direction, and only discernible by individuals themselves. One of my favorite quotes from the I Ching, #60 Limitation (excuse ancient phallocentric language):
Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man's life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is. (my emphasis)
What, me worry?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯… Whoever figured out this graphic was brilliant. It’s adorable.
I think the trick here is that the more I can give myself over to guidance from the part of myself that is not fearful, not ego, then the easier it is to not worry—to feel good. Feeling good does not exclude any of the feels—sadness, grief, anger, maybe even despair at times—
Feeling good means feeling real, feeling alive. It means feeling oneself to be part of something more than the individual self, which, far from obliterating the individual self, ennobles it, allows the self to feel whole.
In giving myself permission to feel as good as I can—to feel empowered to follow my own vision, and experience the pleasures of my senses (which, in the absence of fear and worry, are heightened), I may be more useful than if too much of my energy goes into creating the static of misguided self-protection.
I am in the midst of very active pondering about how best to use myself at this time in my life. I feel sure that there is no external criteria with the authority to judge what is worth doing and what isn’t, what will matter and what won’t. I’m pretty sure that sitting under a tree and vibrating with its energy may be just as helpful to the big vibration as talky talk, or jumping up and down and shouting.
I’m not saying that we don’t need to speak up… to call our representatives, write postcards, go to protests, to collaborate and support each other in finding language and actions that bring clarity and light to a dark time.
We need to make art. To make art is to collaborate with the mysterious present.
Lotta Love
I was listening to the old Nicolette Larson song Lotta Love: It’s gonna take a lotta love to change the way things are… it’s gonna take a lotta love, or we won’t get too far…
I am well aware that saying what the world needs now is love sweet love it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of seems simplistic. It doesn’t protect me from the real struggle of living a human life. But, as I wrote on the GOD image I shared in my last post, LOVE is Life’s One Vital Essence, and the more each one of us can channel that essence, be that essence, the closer we will come to a time of sane, intelligent, caring actions by our species, instead of the current shit show.
As Max Erhmann said in his timeless poem Desiderata: You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
Let’s go with that. Let’s be here now.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:34, New King James Version
Bravo! This is a truly great essay.
May be the best yet. Brilliant. Thank you.