On Anxiety and Gratitude

I've been thinking and writing a lot about anxiety recently (offline for now...but today a little sneak peak).

Because anxiety is so unpleasant, we often wonder how to make it go away. And while I don't think that our primary focus should be on removing anxiety, I do think that we as humans can do things to reorient our relationship to the anxiety that is an essential feature in all of our lives.

One of the key ways to do this is cultivating the practice of gratitude.

I don't mean just being thankful, or communicating appreciation to others, or even summoning up a warm fuzzy feeling after binging on turkey.

Instead I'm talking about gratitude as an entire perspective, perhaps even a world-view, that recognizes that all that we have in our lives are gifts.

This computer to write on.... a gift.
These words and ideas to share with others... a gift.
This meal to enjoy and be nourished by... a gift.
This friend who calls to unburden themselves because life is hard... a gift.
This house to live in and create a space of hospitality... a gift.
This sinus cold that forces me to slow down... a gift.
This breath... a gift.

When we immerse ourselves in this way of thinking, it reminds us that our belief that we possess so much of what we cling to is an illusion. It shows us that these temporal things were given to us, and will be taken away at some point even if only by death. We can be grateful for their presence in our lives today, and in doing so we remember our correct place in relationship to the universe.

This practice alleviates anxiety because we no longer have to worry in the same way about losing things or people…or the uncertainty of losing them…because we recognize that they were never ours to begin with, and that they will certainly be taken from us at some point. In our anxious moments we often create a false sense of uncertainty...."what if someone I loves dies", or "what if I die?" But there is no real uncertainty here - people you love will die and someday you will die too - the only uncertainty is how and when. To cling to others and own lives is deeply human. It is engrained in the architecture of our biology. To seek self-preservation and deny the reality of death is also deeply human. But we are more than human animals, we are creatures with consciousness and the capacity to transcend our humanity. We can overcome our clinging and denying by recognizing and living the higher truths of the universe. In this case, the truth that all that we experience is passing, temporal, and limited, and that to cling to anything is futile.

My daughter found a wildflower at a park and was captured by its beauty. Naturally she wanted to continue enjoying its beauty, so she picked it in order to keep it. On the ensuing walk home, she realized that she might drop it and lose it, so she grasped it tightly in her hands. By the time we were home it was crushed, dry, and in pieces, no longer a thing of beauty...and she too was crushed with the sadness of losing something precious.

When we recognize and experience the futility of clinging, the desperate attempts to protect, hoard, and secure things that can’t be kept indefinitely, we can learn to stop clinging so hard. But because letting go is so counter-intuitive for us as humans we must have a higher principle and practice that can allow us to transcend our instinctive grasping. It is gratitude that reorients our perspective, diminishes the illusions of permanence, and allows us to begin again the process of not anxiously holding on to things that we can’t hold on to.

So we must cultivate gratitude, like a garden that we attend to each day. It is not enough to make a mad dash to be thankful once a year, because gratitude at its heartfelt level is a perspective that extends far beyond a feeling of thankfulness.

It is that perspective of being a receiver of gifts.

Some of the gifts we freely welcome – prosperity, health, children, happiness, strength, skills. Others seem less welcome or even unwelcome; suffering, sadness, anxiety, pain, limitations, difficult people, bad weather. But each of these, in spite of our desire to avoid them can be experienced as gifts if we do the hard mental work of recognizing their temporal nature and opportunity to be redeemed for something good.

And as it turns out those gifts we heartily welcome and pursue can bring with them their own share of suffering. As I've written about before, sometimes the things we desire end up enslaving us, and the things we avoid offer freedom.

In spite of our culture which teaches us that we are entitled to everything our heart desires, we can learn to refuse that deception and recognize our true identities as receivers of gifts. When we cultivate gratitude, we become increasingly able to view these things in our life for the gifts that they are, even those things which seem negative.

Try this. Ask yourself: 

What do I fear losing in life these days? 

How do I think losing that will affect me?

How did I get the thing I'm afraid of losing...did I really get it all by myself, or did certain things outside of my control occur first to bring it into my life?

Is it something I can actually hold on to forever?

What might happen if instead of clinging to it, I loosened my grip, gave thanks for it, and truly enjoyed what it brings to my life today?

How can I use this gift to make life better for others?

War in my head...

Tonight I left to go to work with a lot of anxiety. It was nothing to do with work itself, it was a deep sense of dread that nothing matters in life. It's hard to believe I could walk out the door from a wife and daughters I adore and cherish and still even question life's meaning. But I'm a complicated guy and my intellect and my work as a psychologist have led me to some dark spaces. I have a strong theology of suffering, but the hellish thing I heard this week...well...it reminds me of all the other torture stories I've heard in the past 10 years, and it sucks me into those powerful questions I have about human life being anything more a terrible mistake of evolution. Consciousness allows us to do some amazing things, but it's also an enormous burden.

And at the risk of sounding like I'm coming unglued, I think I heard a voice tonight.

I had a patient cancel at the last minute, and in the mean time I decided to confront my angst with silence.

In the silence I heard that voice I've so rarely heard - probably because I'm such a terrible fucking skeptic.

Oddly, it was a voice that reminded me of something my friend wrote about church.

My friend said that a church is a group of people trying together to learn to have their hearts beat like God's beats. That we learn the rhythm of God's heart, and try to have our hearts beat in time with His.

Beautiful.

If the spiritual metaphor is too vague, what I'm saying is that I think we have to learn to love the things that God loves, in the ways that God loves. That life's meaning is to be found in emulating Jesus...not by being religious...but by loving in those radical ways that overcome darkness and torture and death. We defy the horror of this life and that sick empty feeling that chases a lot of us whenever we slow down, by choosing to love extravagantly.

And as I tear myself away from my own internal battle long enough to realize that I am not the sole decision maker about whether my life is ultimately meaningful or worthwhile,  I'm captivated by the thought that those whom I'm bound to in life - my family, my community, the patients I serve, the God that I wrestle with - also have something to say about whether or not my life is meaningful. It makes me realize that I need other people - that any question about existence is not for me to work out as a private intellectual enterprise - but can only be resolved in the context of who I am in relationship to others. And hesitantly I acknowledge that for me this must include others who believe and doubt this story of Jesus.

But I have a lot bad feelings and thoughts about church. These days fewer of those thoughts are judgemental angry ones, and most are just despair because I can't find an enduring or satisfactory answers about who we are to be as a church.

Yet maybe it really is so simple (not easy, but simple) as learning to pattern our own hearts after God's, and learning to do this together in the context of community. As much as I struggle with Christians, I need them. I need to have them in my life to learn how to love...and they need me...with all my selfish, critical, over-thinking, brokenness. They aren't just the blue section on my Google calendar, they are a part in God's invitation for me to learn how love as God loves. They are God's invitation to a life saturated in meaningfulness, redemption, and hope.