Today probably you're a bit anxious maybe about
some work you have to finish, people you have to see, some chores you've neglected
Anxiety often appears to be about particular things
promising us that if only they can be overcome, we'll reach a stage of long-lasting serenity and security
but really, if we are frank about how we function
the problem really seems larger and more fundamental.
Beyond any specific thing we happen to be worrying about
looked at overtime we're simply anxious
to our core in a very basic make up of our being.
Through we may focus day-to-day on this or that particular worry creating static in our minds,
what we're really up against is anxiety as a permanent feature of life:
something irrevocable, existential, dogged and responsible for ruining a dominant share
for our brief time on earth.
Tortured by anxiety, we naturally fall prey to some powerful fantasies
about what might finally bring us calm.
At certain points especially in the north, the fantasies latch on to travel.
Here at last there would be peace under the clear blue sky,
on the island eleven and half hours from here seven times zones away,
with the warm water lapping at our feet
and with access to the seaside villa on pontoons.
It's just the matter holding on for a few more months and parting with a extraordinary sum
or perhaps we be calm if the house could be really as we wanted with everything in it's place
no more clutter, pristine walls, ample cupboards, stripped oak, limestone
or perhaps we'll be calm when one day when we reach the right place in the company
when the novel is sold, or the film is made, or our shares worth hundreds of millions
and we can walk into a room full of strangers now know at once who we are
or, and this one we might keep on private
the might become if we have the right sort of person in our lives
someone who can properly understand us, a creature with whom wouldn't be so difficult
would be kind and playful and sympathetic with a thoughtful compassionate eyes
and in whose arms we could lie in peace almost like a child, but not quite.
Travel, home, status, love: the four great contemporary ideals around which fantasies of calm collect.
Yet despite the promises and the passion expended in the pursuit of these goals, none of them will work.
There'd be anxiety in the beach, in the pristine home, after the sale of the company
and in the arms of anyone you could ever seduce.
Anxiety is a fundamental state for well-founded reasons:
because we are intensively vulnerable physical beings,
a complicated network of fragile organs all binding that time before eventually letting us down catastrophically;
because we got insufficient information, upon which to make most major life decisions
we're steering more or less blind, because we can imagine so much more than we have
and living a mediatized societies where envy and restlessness is always a constant;
because we're the descendants of the great warriors of the species, the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals
and because we still carry in our bones into the calm of the suburbs the terrors of the savannah.
All of which isn't to say that aren't better or worse ways to approach anxiety.
The single most important move is to accept that we'll always be anxious.
There is no need on top of everything else to be anxious, that we're anxious.
That mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we're alive.
So we should be more careful when pursuing things will imagine spare us anxiety.
We can pursue them by all means but for other reasons than fantasies of calm
and with perhaps a little less vigour and a little more skepticism.
We should also spare us of the burden of loneliness:
we're far from the only ones with this problem, everyone is more anxious than they're inclined to admit.
Even the tycoon or the couple in love are suffering
We've collectively failed to admit to ourselves what we truly like.
We should learn to laugh about our anxieties, laugh to be the exuberant expression of relief
when a hitherto to private agony, is given a well-crafted social formulation in a joke.
At last we should hug, not the forced intimacy of most modern hugs
but the melancholy, sympathetic way Botticelli's angels do it -
having come down to Earth to offer comfort to humans for the brute facts of earthly existence.
We must suffer alone, but we can at least hold out our arms
to a similarly tortured, fractured and above all else, anxious neighbours
as if to say in the kindest way possible, I know!