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chapter-7

the something else (part 2)

So what exactly is the Something Else that we yearn for and that leaves us anxious when we don’t have it? I put the question out to readers on my blog. I invited those who suffer anxiety to chime in if they felt comfortable. ‘What was it that you’re missing that causes you to fret and get restless? What is it that triggers your nervous loneliness? What do you yearn?’ I didn’t have to ask, do you yearn. I got 468 responses. No one writes back ‘A new Lexus’.

I yearn for a complete sense of self; I’m not sure it’s something I can find or something I just have to wait for.

I want to be authentic.

I yearn to find the real me. I feel I am missing a connection with myself. But the thing is I want to find it while ‘life-ing’. I want to have yearning and be in this life.

Everything seems to be fractured, rather than unified as my gut tells me ought to be the case. This stems from a yearning for the world to make sense, to fit together.

I yearn for life direction and purpose. My dad’s illness made me question what I REALLY want to be doing with my life as I could inherit the illness and I don’t want to waste time.

I want to wake up. I feel like a zombie going through the motions of work and married life and the real me is dormant.

I want to know the real me, even if I have no idea what the real me is.

To know the connection to a bigger force. To know that the universe has got this one.

It burns at me every day to know that everything I’m doing makes sense.

When I read through the responses I noted that most of the responders seemed to be suggesting the same cruelly ironic thing: — cruel irony 4

We yearn for something even if we don’t know what it looks like or if it actually exists.

37.

The Germans have a word for this.

Sehnsucht: (noun) An intense yearning for something far-off and indefinable.

Me, I yearn to sit with myself comfortably on that little bench in the sun. I yearn to know what this caper called life is all about and to know that I fit into a bigger scheme. That it all makes sense. I yearn for the expansive, magnificent spaciousness that comes from this calm connection and from not needing anything more. I want to wake up to this truth and to stop the pretending we all go on with – that shopping is identity-­forming, that owning real estate matters, that beating our peers is a worthwhile pursuit.

This is at the heart of my anxiety. Actually, more specifically, the fact that I can’t grasp it, connect with it, live it, is at the heart of it. It always has been. I hope you know what I mean.

38.

As I wrote this chapter, a friend introduced me to a few books and essays by Irish poet and philosopher, David Whyte. In his book The Three Marriages, Whyte says we need to navigate three vital relationships in life: one to others (‘particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person’), another to work, and another to one’s self ‘through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else’.

Whyte believes these relationships all involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously and that we should work on all three marriages, not as separate entities that have to be pitted against each other (in order to find that elusive ‘balance’ between work, social life and ‘me time’), but as a ‘conversation’ where all three are equally important.

But, he flags, the toughest hook-up is with our selves. It’s also the most critical, because without it the other two are but desperate, wobbly, outward-looking clamberings: ‘Neglecting this internal marriage, we can easily make ourselves a hostage to the externals of work and the demands of relationship. We find ourselves unable to move in these outer marriages because we have no inner foundation from which to step out with a firm persuasion. It is as if, absent a loving relationship with this inner representation of our self, we fling ourselves in all directions in our outer lives, looking for love in all the wrong places.’ I committed to meditating regularly as I wrote this book. Even in meditation, when I arrive at that special quietness with myself, I can’t stay there long. I surface very quickly, back to my thoughts, wanting to be distracted away from my internal communion. My mind jerks away from my little mate sitting next to me. I’m sitting here wondering why.

Is it because we’re scared of meeting our selves?

Is it that we’re scared what our selves show us?

Is it the sadness we encounter from realising how long we’ve neglected our selves?

And want to know something funny? The day after writing the above – the very next day – I’m at a café (distracting myself from writing) – and, there, at the table next to me is David Whyte. He’s sitting with a publicist who recognises me and introduces us. He and I stayed in touch and met up for lunch on a subsequent visit. He orders a beer. We’re both annoyed by the noise in the café.

I’m able to ask him why we fear coming in close. ‘If we crave to touch this Something Else, to know it, to be connected, why do we also flee from it, from our selves, into busy-ness and distraction and, well, all the things that make us anxious?’ Whyte’s take is this: ‘Because there’s a silence and aloneness that accompanies a strong relationship with yourself. In that silence we see the truth of our existence and the shortness of life. And this is painful.

‘Also, when we come in close, we become larger … and this requires change. We become more visible, and thus more open to being touched by life, and thus more likely to be hurt.’ I concede most of us do fear all of this. It does seem easier to just run from the Something Else.

But it also hits me in that moment that no matter which way you head, there’s always anxiety. We have an original anxiety that stems from feeling we’re missing something, that there’s more to life, that we need to know where and how we connect with life. But to sit with our true selves causes another anxiety, a lonely, exposed anxiety.

Then, if we flee this sitting with ourselves, we encounter the anxiety of, well, knowing that we’re fleeing ourselves and truth. It’s a quandary; an anxious riddle, as Freud referred to it. I guess we have to ask ourselves, which anxiety is the worse? Or perhaps the question is, if anxiety is unavoidable, which anxiety will produce the better life, the bigger life, the more meaningful life? The better journey?

Whyte also shares this: women are more anxious than men, or at least seemingly so, for evolutionary reasons. ‘Men spent a lot of time alone, following the one beast all day, which is a form of meditation. Women fed off the community. This stops the radical aloneness, the kind required to go in closer.’ Perhaps. Though I did read the other day in Scientific American that the disparity in anxiety between men and women is beginning to be explained at a cellular level. Studies (albeit on rats) are finding that the most basic biological processes involved in the stress response differ markedly between males and females, such that females respond to stress much faster. It generally takes twenty-one days to increase anxiety behaviours in male mice but only six days in females. The researchers speculate that females evolved this way since a heightened state of alertness and awareness best served them to protect their young.

39.

We weren’t always so bewildered by human anxiety and existential yearning.

In Plato’s Protagoras, twin brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus are charged with the rather large gig of Creation. They’re told to set the world up so that every species has a quality or gift that keeps them safe, such that the entire kingdom can exist in balance. Birds get feathers so they fly from harm, deer are blessed with speed and cockroaches get cunning. All is created with sustainability and fairness in mind. But Epimetheus arrives at humans and realises he’s run out of qualities in his sack of gifts.

He has nothing to give man – no fur, no thick hide, no fangs, no great weight. Bugger. He turns to his brother Prometheus, the more insightful of the two. Prometheus suggests a makeshift solution. Humans will have to survive by being the inventors of their own nature. They’ll have to improvise, inventing their own furs and manufacturing contraptions with speed. And they’ll have to remain restless.

You see, while we’re incomplete and restlessly aware of the very fact that something’s missing, it will keep us forever striving forward (making fur substitutes and contraptions). And, thus, secure.

Later theologians banged on about the necessary angst of spiritual enquiry. They refer to it as the ‘divine discontent’; a hunger in the heart, a stirring to expand and grow and get closer to what counts – the Original Thing, The Yearning, the Something Else.

Lucretius the Epicurean said, ‘It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas.’ Augustine of Hippo said, ‘Our heart is restless until it rests in thee.’ By thee, I take him to mean, well, that entity that sits on a bench with us in our heart space.

In 1937 Carl Jung wrote, ‘A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.’ He observed among patients who were particularly resistant to normal treatments a deep anxiety that nothing was right. They eventually found stability, however, through one form of spirituality or another. ‘They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events … This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God.’ Acceptance, rather than a cure, is the goal according to Jung. The release and energy that comes from such acceptance allows the individual to tap into ‘the meaning that quickens’.

The meaning that quickens. This sings to me as an explanation of anxiety.

New York Times conservative political columnist David Brooks (get used to his name, I refer to his mindful opining a lot) wrote a dissection of Lady Gaga’s particular brand of passion (and get used to my referring to passion and creativity; I believe they’re part of the anxious experience).

Brooks supposes that passionate people feel particularly and inherently compelled to complete themselves. This line in his article sang out to me: ‘We are the only animals who are naturally unfinished. We have to bring ourselves to fulfilment, to integration and to coherence.’ A bacon dress is an expression of this exploration. So is our anxiety, I reckon.

40.

Before I read Lucretius, I drew a cartoon about an amoeba. I was probably about fourteen. This particular single-celled being was bored and one day decided to crawl from the prehistoric soupy detritus onto land. ‘What caused this brave little amoba (sic) to leave his comfortable life in the swampy waters to enter the harsh, open air?’ I wrote under a drawing of a formless blob sniffing upwards. ‘A yearning.’ I’d learned at school that the tail of the tadpole-like original being eventually evolved to become a human spine, and the olfactory bulb at its tip became the brain. Ergo, our sense of smell is so direct and original. And so very linked to anxiety. The area of the brain activated during anxiety sits right next to the olfactory bulb and studies at the University of Wisconsin show that when we’re stressed, stuff smells bad. Certain smells can also trigger anxiety. In an instant. I can certainly attest to this interplay. The smell of cut grass sees my stomach drop to my toes – it takes me straight back to swimming carnivals, veritable mud-­wrestling pits for female bullying. If someone swims past me in a chlorinated pool, two lanes over, and they’ve bathed in Cussons Imperial Leather soap at some point in the past 48 hours, I’m rendered vomitous and wary. It’s a smell associated with childhood trauma.

We yearned our way to becoming human. We yearned our way out of our mum’s womb to oxygenated life. It’s painful, we scream as we push forward into it.

41.

I find it wonderful that science is such a rich companion in these thoughts. Crudely, quantum physics breaks matter down to its smallest parts in a quest to find who we are and where it all began. Advances in mathematics have seen scientists break atoms into smaller and smaller particles, until, well, it turns out they arrive at a point where material particles – stuff you can touch – disintegrate. The line between particles and energy becomes blurred and we might see everything as connected to everything else. To put it clumsily, we aren’t particles as such, we’re vast connected energy, or waves, that clump together in such a way that it looks like matter. Which leaves many scientists with this same question: What is this connecting energy that we can’t touch or see? And why was it created? And by whom or what? The Yearning for The Something Else, the original source of our anxiety, remains.