Anxiety

Anxiety:  An unpleasant state of mental uneasiness, nervousness, apprehension and obsession or concern about some uncertain event.

From time to time I read something about a thing that interests me and I steal this information and pass it along as my own.  It's OK for me to do this because I'm not as smart or clever as I'd like to be and I have a desperate, desperate need to be loved and who will love me if I'm not smart and clever?  Who?  Who will?

Some really smart guy named Daniel Smith wrote a memoir about anxiety.  Here's an excerpt where he is comparing our desire to lump anxiety in with a more quantifiable disease like diabetes: 

"With anxiety there are two glitches to this desire.  The first is that anxiety is not the kind of affliction that can be eradicated.  This is because anxiety is not merely or essentially psychiatric. Even when it swells to the level of a disorder, it remains first and foremost an emotion, universally felt and necessary for survival, not to mention for a full experience of human life. Toss aside the bath water of anxiety and you will also be tossing aside excitement, motivation, vigilance, ambition, exuberance and inspiration to name just several of the inevitable sacrifices. Get rid of anxiety?  Even if you could - and you can't - why would you want to?

The second glitch is more complex and has to do with the nature of anxiety itself, which for all its attendant discomforts and daily horrors has at its heart a vital truth, even a transcendent wisdom.  This truth - which, confusingly enough, doubles as the source of anxiety's pain - is of the essential uncertainty and perilousness of human life.  Its fragility and evanescence.  Anxiety emphasizes these aspects of existence with an an almost evangelical  It hisses them, hour by hour, minute by minute, into the sufferer's ear.  'Anything can happen at any time,' anxiety says.  'There is no sure thing.  Everything you hold dear is at risk, everything is vulnerable.  It can all slip through your fingers.' "

My initial thought is: "Have you ever seen more $5 words in two paragraphs than that?"  Maybe cleverness is overrated.  Maybe when I think I'm being clever I'm just being a pompous ass.  Maybe I'm just a pompous ass.

There's a great sentence in our literature which talks about the anxiety that living in a state of continual agitation engenders, afraid that we're going to lose something that we already have or that we're not going to get something that we want.  Which covers everything, every blessed minute of every blessed day.  Our Step work is meant to counterbalance this, to get us to a place where we're in the minute, grateful for what we have, not afraid that we're going to lose it but not desiring more.  Happy where we are.

I'm a big fan of getting information about the human condition from as many sources as I can.  Nothing scratches my itch like The Program literature but I'm also comforted by the wisdom of the many helpful people that are in my life, which the Program literature urges me to do.  It's nice to hear that anxiety if normal, that everyone has it, that it provides some benefit to my life even when it's making me uncomfortable. 

If I walked into a dark cave past a sign reading: "Do not enter.  Bears inside," I better feel anxiety.