Woe #22: existence is devastating, but here's something for your anxiety, maybe
Today, as I went about my day, I felt anxiety chasing me, that crack in the world, the chasm, opening up behind me like a disaster movie. It came closer and closer, just as it did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Today I thought maybe I’d hold my seat for awhile, wait until the anxiety caught me, see what happened. I went for a walk on the roof. On the roof I walked a figure 8 over and over, looking at the ever-changing clouds, looking at the pools of water reflecting the sky above me, at the chimney’s bricks.
Then I began to feel a grief so large it was hallucinatory. The clouds and the bricks and the pools of water seemed entirely unreal. It was like being in a dream. I guess you could say that I fell into that chasm, like Alice down the rabbit hole.
The first time I received reiki, my reiki person said to me “you may find some grief.” “I always find grief,” I said in return.
Now I am falling. There is no ground, only grief. The anxiety has gone away, because I have stopped running. Now I am falling.
If I could learn to live my entire life like this, groundless, falling, I don’t think I would feel so much anxiety. I was wrong above when I said the anxiety was chasing me.The anxiety, it’s not the chasm chasing me, it’s me running away.
There is absolutely no cure for this world. We run, but we cannot escape.
If you think you might want to know a little bit about how to stop running, Pema Chödrön wrote a book you might like to read, called The Wisdom of No Escape. Alan Watts wrote one called The Wisdom of Insecurity. These books won’t fix anything at all, because there’s no fixing the fact that existence is devastating. But, I’ve found them to be helpful, and maybe they’ll help you too.
It's very hard to stop running once and for all. Most of us are running most of the time. But, it is possible to stop for a moment or two. When we stop running we will fall, but at least we don't have to run, so we can catch our breath. And when we find ourselves running again, we can stop and look down, see there is no ground beneath our feet, fall. Over and over again, until there's nothing else left to do but fall.