Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head

by D. Randall Blythe

If something is worth believing in—a political position, a religion, a scientific theory—surely it should withstand a little rigorous examining from a rational, educated observer employing critical thought, yes? If not, that belief should be discarded.

if you are resolutely unwilling to question your own beliefs, if you just accept your habitual thought patterns, prejudices, and beliefs at face value without rigorous analysis simply because it is uncomfortable to do so… then you are driven by fear.

As for me, the older I get, the more I realize that I’m totally clueless about the vast majority of things. This continually comes as a big relief because it’s utterly exhausting trying to have all the answers and be “right” all the time.

we walk through the world under constant assault by a never-ending digital stream of dogmatic opinions, envy-inducing advertisements, and doomsday news items. This incessant barrage of for-profit information, often delivered straight into our hands by addictively designed mobile devices, is enough to induce anger, fear, and confusion in anyone. But with the exception of our very real ability to render the planet incapable of sustaining human life in relatively short order, history shows that all the problems we face today are exactly the same ones ancient civilizations confronted—they’ve just been given a facelift and electronically amplified in our consciousness to a ridiculous level. This noise in our heads can become overwhelming, but when we consciously pause, step back, and broaden our perspective by looking at the experiences of those who have gone before us, we see that life has always been complex, yet somehow it continues on unabated.

Although we cannot eliminate these difficulties—once again, life is complex and always has been—we can lessen our confusion about our problems by consciously searching for a wider, experience-based perspective.

With the proper perspective, we can determine what actually matters in life and what is inconsequential, thereby saving a ton of mental, physical, and emotional energy.

When we are not so exhausted by endless worry over a ton of trivial bullshit, we can instead clearly and calmly face issues of tr...

To strive for a rational, healthy perspective on life without blissfully ignoring reality or being consumed by anger and nihilism—this is the struggle, the war inside my head.

Death is the great leveler, coming for us all regardless of how much power, money, or fame we achieve in our lifetimes.

Some people (particularly those of the fundamentalist-religion persuasion) present a belief in their particular brand of afterlife as an ironclad certainty—but they are fooling themselves, because let’s face it, no one knows what happens when we die.

those who emphatically insist that there is nothing after we die annoy me just as equally as those who insist that they know exactly what the afterlife is.

Although it is irrefutable that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of an afterlife, there’s no scientific evidence against it either—there is simply no evidence, period. Nobody knows, no matter which dogmatic tool they reach for to hammer home their belief.

And in an era when all the knowledge in the world is available at the click of a button, humans seem to be growing less and less capable of dealing with uncertainty. This is a big problem because no matter how much knowledge we accrue, life is, well, it’s full of uncertainty.

I am a firm believer in science, and as such I believe in the law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics. Albert Einstein famously summarized this principle by stating, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another.” Music is composed of sound waves, which move through solids, liquids, and gases, thereby causing objects and substances to vibrate. (This is how we hear—sound waves vibrate our eardrums, and the brain processes the vibrations via the auditory nerve.) Those sound waves are called kinetic mechanical energy. In short, music is an externally and purposefully organized collection of kinetic energy (the energy of motion), and because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, music is, in a very real way, eternal. From the moment of their creation (or rather organization, I should say), songs travel endlessly outward through the universe, ever moving and changing form as they pass through the cosmos.

Stories have power if we use them well.

If I had the power to remove one word from the English language until everyone swore a blood oath to use it properly, that word would be unprecedented. (Although literally comes in a very close second.)

Because all these things have, in fact, occurred multiple times within the last one hundred years (yes, even the toilet paper hoarding), and because the definition of unprecedented is “never known or done before,” not “something-that’s-already-happened-a-zillion-times-before-but-we-haven’t-bothered-to-stop-watching-football-and-reality-TV-long-enough-to-think-about-it-until-now-that-it’s-actually-affecting-us,” its current overuse is not only blatantly incorrect but also dangerous.

Whereas its incessant usage to torque up the constant anxiety spasm that passes for news these days is good for ratings and advertiser satisfaction, currently unprecedented is a fallacy, a lie, an ethical and linguistic abomination.

Unprecedented simply means new, and despite what the media doomsayers, politicians, and peddlers of designer handbags would have us believe, there is nothing new under the sun.

Regrettably, people are very attracted to new, even if it’s bad new. The feeling of excitement imparted by watching the latest bright, shiny thing unveiled—even if it’s a bright, shiny disaster—is irresistible. And although history shows us again and again that politicians lie, people go broke, strange diseases from foreign lands wipe out large numbers of people, and the earth acts in unpredictable ways, the giant media conglomerations know that people would eventually unglue their weary selves from their screens if the corporate mouthpieces were to get honest and say, “Okay, admittedly, some of us ain’t gonna make it, but this is the same old crap we’ve survived repeatedly in the past—it’s just wrapped in plastic now instead of papyrus. Hang in there, y’all—we’ve seen all this before.” So newscasters keep cashing paychecks and toeing the company line, acting as if this is an utterly new terrifying reality instead of an entirely predictable continuation of historical patterns. Regrettably, it seems most folks can’t be bothered to further strain their LCD-battered eyes, rendered feeble and myopic by the luxury that is modern life, to peer into the brutal truth of the past.

if we don’t bother learning from the past, we can easily begin feeling as if the mundane, historically repetitive difficulties woven into the fabric of our day-to-day lives are actually extraordinary and, um, unprecedented. This corrosive belief can manifest in various poisonous ways—uncontrollable anger, bitter envy, and worst of all, paralyzing fear.

Fear is a real motherfucker, a top-shelf, Grade A son of a bitch that will ruin your whole week if you let it run the show. It also has a purpose, rooted in evolution, so FDR wasn’t quite right when he said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—there’s

But aside from those rare life-or-death situations, Roosevelt was right for the most part—unchecked fear is a pernicious, caustic presence in our lives, and it needs to be fought to a standstill at every single opportunity. If we don’t halt fear in its tracks, it can become overwhelming, paralyzing us mentally and emotionally, even physically.

From an evolutionary standpoint, freezing from fear is the next option after the fight-or-flight response is exhausted, when your brain determines that you can neither battle off danger or run away from it. You are stricken immobile, perhaps in a last-ditch psychic defense of disassociating yourself from whatever traumatic experience you are undergoing.

paralyzing fear sucks. It can get you hurt badly, or even killed, so learn to recognize it when it’s happening and fight to not let it consume you.

Unbridled fear can also paralyze you mentally and emotionally, keeping you stuck in a swirling pool of crap: crappy relationships, crappy jobs, and crappy habitual responses to any of life’s crappy situations.

Most of the time, we already know what we should do to make our lives better, but the thought of actually committing to change and taking action to effect it can produce so much anxiety that we often stay stuck in the same old familiar highly uncomfortable comfortable bullshit (the devil you know…).

To my knowledge, telling your power-tripping boss at your sketchy minimum-wage telemarketing job to go fuck herself as you ride off into the sunset in search of a better job hasn’t gotten anyone executed lately, so why on earth do people stay working gigs that make them miserable?

But burned into our genetic code is the memory of that most primal of fears: winding up as lunch for something much bigger than you. Back in the day, that primal fear was invaluable, as it kept your ancestors alive—at least long enough to mate and raise offspring, which eventually produced you: the end product of a few million years of screwing and running away from enormous hungry animals (don’t you feel special now?). But these days, this fear of monsters with sharp teeth doesn’t have anything to attach itself to. Instead, it manifests as anxiety over any of a million different nonlethal things your brain perceives as threats to your well-being. That primal fight-or-flight survival response was designed to deal with immediate, short-term, life-threatening situations, like a pack of wolves circling you in the forest. It was not designed to deal with giving a PowerPoint presentation outlining the abysmal first-quarter profit margins to the CEO of your corporation, but the mechanism is not sophisticated enough to tell the difference—that’s why your hands get so sweaty when you have to give the boss bad news. This sort of fear is an evolutionary hangover, a once-useful ancient response cloaked in the modern and counterproductive costume known as anxiety.

So, even though we cannot eradicate fear and anxiety from our lives, it helps to know their source, to understand why we feel these emotions, and to recognize them for what they are—echoes from a time when the stakes were much, much higher.

Can you imagine a caveman going postal because his flight was delayed or bursting into tears when someone is mean to him on social media? Get the fuck outta here.

some scientists and shark experts are pushing to abolish the term attack, preferring to call them “incidents” or “negative encounters.” I understand their reasoning, but I would use “negative encounter” to describe a run-in with a rude barista at the coffee shop, not getting my leg ripped off in the ocean. Sharks didn’t develop all those lovely teeth to better argue semantics.)

Surfers around the world have different nicknames for sharks—The Man in the Gray Suit, Noah, Mack (as in “Mack the Knife”)—but my personal favorite is The Landlord. The ocean is the shark’s house. He owns it, he knows it, and make no mistake, every time you enter the ocean, there’s a chance he may come cruising by to check out what you’re doing fooling around in his crib. Most of the time he just does a slow drive-by to remind you whose house it is, then splits. But every now and then, on rare occasions, The Landlord decides to collect rent. Rent can be very, very high.

because uncontrolled responses to fear only beget more fear in others, and the last thing this world needs is more fear.

Repeatedly, I abandon hard-earned lessons on perspective and instead catastrophize my entire existence as soon as some trivial annoyance raises its ugly head.

I need to unlearn this shit.

On devices and in forums made possible solely by the rigorous labor of scientifically minded individuals, the demonization of science and the rejection of reason, knowledge, and objective reality itself are not only accepted but also celebrated and weaponized. The irony would be so judgmentally delicious if it wasn’t so goddamned pathetic.

“Hoping for the best” without action to back it up is worse than useless.

Once again, human beings are social animals, and our very survival as a comparatively weak species (no claws, no fangs) has depended on assisting one another. Alongside the instinct for self-preservation, the urge to do the right thing lives on within each of us, even if its shine is dimmed by the daily abrasive cynicism, self-interest, and ennui that coats life in the modern era.

But apathy is the refuge of the intellectual coward, and outrage without action is self-righteous masturbation. No matter how we try to justify our inertia in the face of injustice, be it hipster nihilism or the angry circle jerk of social media, each of us knows right from wrong.

Sometimes a child’s perspective is the most logical.

So, what exactly is the point in a grown-ass adult believing someone is inferior to them because of the shade of their skin? By what bizarre metric do we assign social status to fucking footwear? It makes precisely zero sense, yet society conditions these things into us, beats them into us… but to a child they are insignificant. Why shouldn’t I look to my unpolluted six-year-old self for simple answers to big problems? Once again, the kid knows.

conspiracy theories (aka the security blankets of the witless)

If we are the sum of our experiences, what do we become when those experiences vanish from our minds?

We chart the maps of our existence on earth through various measurements of time, not just the passing minutes and hours, but through the seasons, periods of war, marriage anniversaries, and birthdays of grandchildren

If you want to get better at something, do it while surrounded by people who are already doing it at a much, much higher level than you.

But because the planet is one huge interconnected ecosystem, there’s really no such thing as a “local environment”; there is just the environment, and what affects one place eventually affects all places.

The illusion of connection is a powerful narcotic, and like the tastiest narcotics, it’s highly addictive. And just like those narcotics, if you mess around too much, you’ll wind up strung out and alone, endlessly hitting the refresh button on the hunt to cop just one more cheap endorphin hit from the glowing screen.

mentally, we are still Stone Age humans stumbling around in a virtual Space Age world, and it shows.

As a pragmatic, reality-based person, I am sick of all the handwringing and thoughts and prayers. Although empathy is obviously important, it isn’t bulletproof.