Anxiety

I recently spoke with an old friend, someone who—like I did—opened his eyes in middle age to find that things weren’t working anymore. That he was anxious and depressed and frightened, and he didn’t know what to do.

“Anxiety isn’t a problem,” I told him. “It’s a natural response to threat. But you can’t wish it away; you have to engage with it.”

My friend didn’t understand. Isn’t the goal to feel good?

It brought me back to how I felt a few years ago when—despite my having begun to “awaken"—all I seemed to feel was dread.

I was confused; I didn’t like it. I thought that waking up—or returning to myself—was supposed to make me feel better. Now, I saw everything I’d worked so hard to block out: The way I’d allowed insecurity to run my life, the ways I couldn’t fully share myself with my family and friends. And behind it all—burning white-hot—the reality of the climate disaster we are allowing to enfold us, sleepwalking our way into it like lemmings.

So it’s strange to look at the coming weekend forecast—112°? or only 110°?—and feel a blessed neutrality. The self-doubt I’d felt the last few days—the world’s on fire and you wrote a book?—had melted away.

Everything I feared was still true: The country was still silently tearing itself to pieces. The world’s wise leaders were still allowing us to fall into the abyss. But our work remains the same: Waking up, finding ever-deeper compassion for those who are hurting, expressing our love for our neighbors. It’s not nothing. For those of us who have lived most of their lives in doubt and shadow, as I have, it’s an impossibly precious gift.