How (Not) to Worry… Even (Especially) About Worrying

[Image: an entry, from August, in my #jesstorypix series on Instagram. The caption reads: “It was the last day he’d remember marveling at anything — anything at all. But on this day, this morning by the banks of the Savannah River, yes: he marveled. He marveled at the smoke in the sky, the height of the flames in far-off Jacksonville, casting their eerie light on the clouds, the absence of any other people… and yet, the frighteningly normal pall that underlay it all…”]

Among the several weekly newsletters I subscribe to in the hope they’ll make me smarter, gentler, cleverer, and/or simply more me is one called Aeon. (It’s a nonprofit publication with offices in Australia, Great Britain, and the US. Subscriptions are free; contributors include philosophers, psychologists, scientists, numerous other authorities, artists, and so on. It sums up its mission: “We are committed to big ideas, serious enquiry and a humane worldview. That’s it.”) However, I don’t read every weekly edition of the site’s offerings (which probably indicates my wishy-washy commitment to becoming smarter, gentler, etc.).

This week, whiskey river drew my attention to “The usefulness of dread,” an essay first published at Aeon in 2018, with this excerpt:

An anxiety is a lens through which to view the world, a colouration that grants the sufferer’s experiences their distinctive hue. The Buddha alerted us to a fundamental metaphysical feature of this world, the ‘co-dependent arising’ of all that we experience and know. That is, nothing possesses existence independent of all else that makes it so: an anxious person inhabits a world coloured and contoured by their own, highly individual anxieties; it is a world co-constructed by the sufferer and his or her anxieties. Anxiety is therefore a perspective, a hermeneutical relationship with the world, whose text now gets read in a very peculiar way by this anxiety-laden vision. Things and persons and events fall into focus depending on their interactions with our anxieties: that man in the corner becomes threatening, this chair becomes unstable and unbalanced, that food becomes the agent of a fatal illness, my family — my wife, my daughter — appear as targets for cruel twists of fate. I live in a distinctive world shaded and illuminated by an idiosyncratic anxiety.

(Samir Chopra [source])

Now, if you remember this RAMH post from a couple of weeks ago, you’ll recognize why this passage so spoke to me. Naturally enough, I think, I at once hied me hence to read the rest of Chopra’s essay. It may be worth a read for anyone similarly afflicted (at least, if one is not put off by intellectual responses to something as visceral as dread). For instance:

We are rational animals, but implicit in that rationality is an anxiety. The rational animal remembers and has learned from its past; it anticipates and plans for its future; it modifies its present, anxiously, in response to these memories and anticipations; it is anxious to avoid mistakes, even those it cannot remember and has consigned to the unconscious forgotten… I propose a ‘self-as-bundled-anxieties’ theory: we are a bundle of anxieties; by examining them, to see what vexes us, what makes us anxious, we come to know who we are. Anxiety is a reminder that our selves are rather more diffuse and disorderly than we might imagine, that there are more bits to be seized as they swirl ‘about’ and ‘inside’ us…

My anxieties tell me I’m still capable of feeling. They provide an acute reminder that I’m alive and responsive, and yes, anxious. My anxieties about my family inform me that I have let myself become wrapped up in their selves; they inform me of the boundaries I have formed around and about myself; they inform me of what my self is. They inform me of the risibility of the claim that we are isolated beings whose boundaries terminate at our fingertips, at the surface of our skins. Thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.

(Chopra, ibid.)

I’m not sure what to make of all this. Like a superhero, I have donned a cloak pretty much every day of my thinking life (the Cloak of Apprehension and Second Thoughts); by now, a good part of me wonders why I bother to take it off before going to bed. Still, as they say, it’s always possible to have too much of a thing. Maybe I should have a go at Chopra’s approach — this “Good morning, Anxiety! Up already? Good to see you again!” sort of thinking.

Or maybe I’m misstating his case, oversimplifying it. I probably should worry about that before working out anything like a new Life Goal, eh?