Surely what a man does when he is caught off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is?
C. S. Lewis
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor RooseveltÂ
Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Death Checks
In general, I don’t feel very frightened by the prospect of my death. But I must worry a good deal about my loved ones dying, since I routinely practice these instinctive “death checks”:
- My phone’s voicemail is always full because I don’t delete old messages. One reason I don’t delete old messages is that I want to have a record of my loved ones’ voices, in case they should leave the earth and I should otherwise never hear their voices again.
- When I walk past a sleeping family member, I pause for a few moments in front of the couch or bed to check that the sleeper’s chest rises and falls—just to reassure myself that death has not come and whisked him away in sleep.
- I hate being on bad terms with anybody for very long. My mind quickly summons hypothetical thoughts of disaster and wonders what would happen if our final exchange were a foul one. This is a blessing in its way, since it makes me quick to ask forgiveness and make amends.
- Similarly to (3), when I find my relationship with a loved one growing stale or flagging, I chase away the lukewarmness by saying: “Who knows how long we have together? How awful I’d feel if I didn’t try to love enough and then one day never had the chance to try anymore.”Â
As for myself: I’m less afraid of dying and more afraid of living for a very long time in illness or pain. It takes courage (from the Latin cor, “heart”) to live.
My family will probably opine that these are morbid thoughts. But I don’t consider myself a morbid human being—…just a slightly frightened one.
A Tip on Finding Peace
Here’s something I realized not too long ago. It’s been a helpful way for me to frame the question of calming anxiety and finding peace. Perhaps it will be useful to you, too, in the occasional moment of distress:
When you’re anxious, you don’t need to create your own peace. All you have to do, really, is to lean into a peace that already surrounds you. This peace is always perfect, and always in the air, no matter how crazy or rebellious or out-of-touch with it you feel.Â
Sometimes I add to my panic because I think that I need to deep-breathe just so, or forgive my resentments just so, or pray just so, or practice positive thinking just so*, in order to preserve a state of inner peace. But this is a manufactured peace, and it’s contingent on my own abilities to be perfect. And if it’s not already evident to you, I’m certainly not perfect. So relying on my own peace-creating capacities is a dangerous game. In fact, I spoil half the time I’m actually peaceful by worrying that my peacefulness will soon disappear and be replaced by the old feelings of anxiety—just because I haven’t been using my “peaceful time” well enough!
To rely instead on God’s peace is a relief. This peace does not grow or diminish in response to the vagaries of your mind and physiology. It’s always whole and perfect and entire—no matter what. Nothing you do can spoil or threaten its existence. If you don’t believe in God, you can still envision a perfect all-encompassing peace that threads its way through the world: in harmony with the mountains and the flowers and the barking of dogs and the sleeping of babes. A peace that has sustained the cycles of life since the dawn of time.
I think of this proposition in very physical terms. Doing so helps me to realize that there is an objective peace that actually exists. I imagine my body slipping into the peace that already exists all around me—my shoulders automatically relax and I breathe a little more easily. It is less a matter of making a new peace of my own (through breathing or thinking or tapping acupressure points or even “perfectly aligning myself” with God) and more a matter of accepting an extant peace that’s available to me around the clock.
Does this make sense? Perhaps I haven’t sufficiently described the nuances of this insight that made it a useful, rather than banal, observation for me. But I do hope it helps at least one of you along the way! Pax—Elizabeth
*That’s not to say that these tools—breathing techniques, compassionate self-talk, EFT, even some approaches to prayer–aren’t effective at reducing anxiety. They can be. They’ve worked for thousands of people. But, in my experience, the responsibility of figuring out which techniques to practice, and trying to practice them perfectly, can sometimes cancel out their positive effects.
The Beginnings of a Story about Joseph
The beginnings of a story about Joseph. I don’t know where it’s headed. Perhaps I will sit down to continue it soon. But, for now, the rough sketches of an entry-point:Â
Joseph was a fine man born in the latter part of spring. He was always working in the fields, growing wheat, until the time he was eighteen. At eighteen, he was called away to war and rode in a boat that carried him overseas and dropped him on shore many miles from home. He was a good soldier, tidy and loyal and not inclined to dispute. He simply did his job without remark and each night he came back to his bunk and fell into heavy and dreamless sleep. Sometimes, on Mondays, he wrote letters home, to his aunt and his uncle who raised him (for his parents had died when he was three years old). He wrote simple and affectionate lines, never filling more than a page or two, undramatically sending his love and relieving any fears that he was underfed or underslept, &c. &c. And then, at last, after many months—more than a year—the war tapered off to a few diffuse skirmishes and Joseph was sent home. He was nearly twenty by then and his aunt and his uncle, after making sure all his limbs were intact and his belly full of biscuits and cream, started to talk to him of marriage. Joseph, it happens, was a handsome, if solemn, man. His chin was cut clean and sure and his eyes were deep and brown. No one could pretend that his was an unattractive face; although, for some, its solemn expression marred the beauty and made it undesirable.
Joseph stayed mostly quiet through the whole affair. His aunt stuffed him with gossip about the girls from town—how they admired his curls, how they blushed when he walked into the post office to send some letters—and he would smile at his aunt obligingly, saying little. From time to time his uncle shot him a look of compassion, but he, too, had decided that marriage was the only happy fate for a young man. Joseph, always dutiful, nodded his head and did not protest.
One day, while Joseph was out in the fields (for he had returned to his old work of growing wheat), a great gust of wind blew across the earth.
Quick Nonsense
A few quick exercises in nonsense. Read only for fun!
The fish and the cat became friends when the dog died. They lived in a blue house on a suburban street in the middle of a country whose name I forgot. It was well and good to say they were an odd couple—for surely they were—but it was also true that they had a striking synergy that kept them in good spirits all day long.
—
Dear John,
There are too many ways to tell you to get lost.
I can’t settle on just one.
So why don’t you try on a couple of these for size?
Your beard always scratches my face.
I bought you boots for your birthday because boots are made for walking.
The hair on my head is not yours for the counting anymore.
Sincerely,
Me
—
Oh my, how the weeds have grown! I can’t stop counting their seeds. Soon they’ll be bigger than you, bigger than me, bigger than the house we live in! How can anyone stand the attack? They advance fast and lively—quicker than a dart—and then, before you can blink, they’ve surrounded you. What do you make of that? It’s a metaphor for life, you see. It’s a way of talking about evil without really naming the beast. Clever, isn’t it? The weeds are doing us in. They’re ugly: a canker sore on the mouth of man. They’ll make us dead to the earth before we know it. They’ll make us think of the things we love and twist our minds until we believe we hate them. Oh my, how they weeds have grown!