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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
Read between
May 16 - May 25, 2021
In psychology circles this kind of experimenting is called “distress tolerance” and entails working with your specialist to remain in anxiety-provoking situations until your fear capacity becomes exhausted. Which it does.
My metamission is simply to stay. And see what happens. So the quality of the tea, the comfort of my perch and the wobbliness of the table almost doesn’t matter. I back the fuck off.
Sitting in grim is also a defiant two-fingered up yours to your anxiety. I think this is great.
“If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety . . . the greater the anxiety, the greater the man,”
Kierkegaard, however, adds this clincher to his bold claim, which makes my fluttery heart settle a little as I read it: “He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.”
Says David Brooks, not at all in contrast, “The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.”
Wabi-sabi has no direct translation in English. But the gist is the finding of beauty in imperfection and impermanence, as well as the cycles of messy growth and crumbling decay. This is because that’s the way life just goes. And nonresistance IS beautiful.
Whimsy drags us from our purpose-mad existence, it presses “pause” long enough for us to get a taste of life lived in “the now” and freefall for a bit. To see what happens.
Chris Baréz-Brown writes in How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas that ruts are best broken with small moments in whimsy, not seismic changes in behavior. Which is mental muscle building writ differently. Counting men with mustaches on the way to the bus stop is enough to shift perspective, he says.
I generally find that anxious people spend a lot of their lives trying to have fun doing stuff that other people find enjoyable. Things like hens’ days, doing big group brunches on Sundays with way too much Hollandaise sauce involved, lying by swimming pools, yum cha, the races . . . actually this is a list of the things that I struggle with. Your list is no doubt different. The point is to recognize that we do this—defer to others’ notions of fun. And that this is probably because we struggle with choice (how do you decide what your preference is amid all the things to do in the world?). And
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acknowledging that I simply don’t like doing a lot of what other people like doing.
It’s a silent scream because when you’re a highly controlled, insanely well-behaved A-type with a too-tight grip on life, it’s beyond you to howl your pain at full throttle. I’m in the worst place I’ve been in my life. I no longer care about my own welfare. And yet I’m worried what the neighbors would think if I howled out loud. And the very fact that I’m micromanaging my own breakdown takes me down even further.
Dr. David Horgan, from the Australian Suicide Prevention Foundation, says that once we see dying as an option, our minds will focus on finding proof that this is right, ignoring all the evidence that it’s a shockingly bad idea.
Or—and now the feeling gets even lighter—I could choose to exist, anew. From ground zero, I could opt back in. And I could do it freely, working from a blank slate without all my old stuff—no expectations as to how life “should” be lived, no false and unhealthy ideas about my worth (that I have to achieve to be loved), no attachment to possessions or money. I could be an interloper with no fixed address and just the clothes on my back. I could do life completely differently. It becomes viscerally apparent that I have nothing to lose and no one to impress. This appeals and it swells as an idea,
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You descend. An anxiety spiral takes you here pretty effectively. In fact, an anxiety spiral is the descent toward grace. Can you see how I’m repositioning things here? Can you see what I’ve been working up to? You go into pain. How? You sit in it. You stay. You simply be uncomfortable. You get raw. You don’t change hotel rooms. Then you open. As you sit in the pain, you face what you’ve been fleeing. You see it and let it be. You create space for it to do that old “it is what it is” thing. You let it unfurl and express. This is not easy. But it’s bold and brave and purposeful. Next, you
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“Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”
according to the results of more than 300 studies over the past twenty years or so, up to 70 percent of people who went through the anxious ringer report positive psychological growth at the other end. We’re talking a greater appreciation for life, a richer spiritual life and a connection to something greater than oneself, and a sense of personal strength. You could call it character.
The more we are shaken, the more our former selves and assumptions are blown apart and the fresher the growth.
Harvard researchers found this kind of seismic implosion often leads to creativity. The space created by stepping into the “is-ness” of life invites innovative thought and exploration. The examples of this kind of life disaster–first trigger for creative greatness are well known. The research goes as far as showing that people who felt more isolated after a traumatic event reported even greater creativity.
“When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’ But when an old person dies [it’s] with his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”
I’ve arrived at an age where accepting this is “just my life” brings peace and, going through the motions of anxiety when it arises, strangely it helps. This too will pass. You fight it still, but it lessens over time. — Anthea
As Steve Jobs shared in his Stanford commencement speech, life and its hardships only make sense when you get old enough and you’re able to look back and join the dots. You have to have dots in your experience for the picture to take form. When you look back on your life you can see that pulling out of college from nervousness (as he did, instead sitting in on typography lectures), is what led you to run a graphically orientated tech empire. But only once you have enough dots.
Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet: I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Yep, 108 again. It’s an auspicious number in several Eastern traditions and is a mathematically pure and abundant number. Plus, the diameter of the sun is 108 times the diameter of the Earth. I like all these factlets. And that the number pops up in my life daily.
The Little Speck calls out to God that she’s ready to find out who she is. So God takes the Little Speck and deposits her far out into the darkness of the universe. There the Little Speck is surrounded by pitch black, which freaks her out. Against the darkness, not surrounded by the other familiar specks of light in the sun, she sees herself alone. She cries out to God, “Why have you forsaken me? I wanted to see who I am! This is not what I asked for.” God says, “To see that you are light you must first go out into the dark.”
As W. B. Yeats wrote, “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
take off to some dirt and rocks and hike when I have anxiety in my bones. These two things—ocean swimming and hiking—are what make me the happiest. And anxiety brought me to them.
For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river/Unbearable pain becomes its own cure. — 18th-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib
