thank you, mr roosevelt
Sitting here at the Perk, trying to tease out a singular thought from all the stuff that’s been swirling in my head lately. The din is getting to me a little bit, making it a bit hard to think. Maybe I need to go someplace silent.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Fear, pain, and imagination: the holy trifecta of paralysis. Fear of fear, fear of pain, and the absolutely crippling fear that comes from being unable to imagine the future.
I think so many of the mistakes I’ve made in my life—mistakes of stasis, staying where (and with whom) I shouldn’t—can be chalked up to a lack of imagination, an inability to see, in my mind’s eye, how life could continue after whatever it was occurred.
It’s not as if I ever thought that the act would literally kill me.
But the inability to imagine life after the fact is almost as good as thinking you’ll be dead. You can’t see things going on; you know, objectively, the sun will rise, the earth will turn, the capitalist system will continue to churn away, chewing us all up. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? It feels like oblivion. The mind won’t work, the internal TV station cannot be tuned in, the future is blank and dark and infinite and unknowable. The panic kicks in, like the world is ending, and the struggling begins: the kicking and the screaming and the denial.
But the only way out is through.
And the more I go through it, the more I go through *with* it, the more I realize that it’s just a quirk of my brain (or maybe a quirk of human brains in general).
I don’t worry so much any more. I don’t fret. I know how I think I want things to turn out, but if they don’t, I can take it. I will roll with it. I am not so attached to a particular outcome that the mere idea of not achieving it makes me want to shirk away from whatever it is I have to do.
In this way, so many failures and disappointments are a blessing. I have had the opportunity to learn from experience—again and again and again, thank you—that things can fall apart completely and I will survive. I may get beaten up, evicted, rejected, betrayed, lose all my money, cartwheel tumble into debt, get fired or sued or just about any noxious thing you can imagine, and yet I will survive. And I will probably be better for it.
This isn’t self-deluded, post-hoc justification, it’s the honest appraisal of a gift. It’s the gift of freedom. If you are not attached to the future you see in your mind as the one true and only choice—that or die, but the world isn’t binary—then you can take things as they come. It doesn’t mean I don’t try to make things good for myself, but I’m more able to let go of that conception of the future if it doesn’t come to pass. And if I can let go of that image in my mind, not only can I avoid screwing myself out of life by acting out of fear, I can also make the most of the things, people, and situations that cross my path unexpectedly.
The idea that we can control life—or anything—is just a lie we tell ourselves, anyway. And the idea that there is such a thing as a direct chain of causality that we can foresee, enact, and affect is just a myth we like to believe. It’s a gift to have the scales removed from your eyes and be able to take on the world as it really is.
And this gift only comes from risk and suffering. You can’t learn this by studying books or listening to people’s stories; if you never risk your neck, if you never venture outside long enough to get sunburned and bitten and whacked in the face by the 2x4 that is reality, you’ll never learn. It must be an object lesson.
And it seems like the world is full of people who’ve survived by keeping their heads down and bowing out. The most vicious thing is that these people think that they are doing right by themselves, by avoiding things that feel bad—it’s only natural to try and shy away from pain and suffering, after all—but in reality, they’re crippling themselves and making their worlds that much smaller.
The only way out is through. And pain is transformative.
We all need to recognize that the feelings of pain and fear are actually indicators that we’re about to learn something important, if we’ll only wait, and watch, and listen.
