Letting Go...a little

I've been writing very little lately, but my self-reflection has been going on nonetheless. I'm still early in my thinking about these topics, so I invite feedback and critique even more than normal. Hopefully this is clear enough to make sense to most folks....

I've been thinking about why certain things bother me as much as they do.

I've told myself time after time that professional success, wealth, productivity, and personal achievement are really not so important. But it's like a little part of me doesn't believe it. When these things are threatened or attacked, or even lost, it evokes emotional responses more strong than I would care to admit. I can rationalize with myself endlessly, but it seems in spite of "knowing better", I really am holding on. You only defend the things you covet, and this year in the midst of some life changes, I've come to realize that I have a pretty strong attachment to things I wish I didn't.

Why can't I let go?

Ernest Becker, an under-appreciated psychologist and thinker, poses a thoughtful approach.

Becker suggests that many of us use "life projects", things like careers, accumulation of assets, children, development of reputation, and building a legacy as ways of dealing with the inherent anxiety of death that is hardwired in each of us as humans. Okay, now before you all check out from this article and tell yourselves that you don't fear death, just slow down for a moment and consider that perhaps you feel reassured by your beliefs about the afterlife, but that you haven't entirely managed to escape the most profound existential reality facing all of humanity, which is, that we are aware of our own impending deaths. It might even be true to say that the innate biological drive towards self-preservation, automatically creates a dilemma us as humans who are aware that we are going to die someday. I'm not suggesting that we can't transcend this, just like we transcend our selfish tendencies at times, by experiencing God's love....but most of us would have to admit even with selfishness, we're a work in progress. Perhaps too often in Christian circles, we've been quick to treat our fear of death as an either/or, rather than a work in progress. But I digress...

Assuming that deep down, mostly unconsciously, that we do fear death, it seems there might be things we will do to alleviate that anxiety. While we might simply deny our inevitable fate, humans seem to gravitate towards more complicated forms of denial, things that allow us to rationalize and fool ourselves into thinking that we're not denying anything at all. Becker suggests that these life projects give us a sense of life being meaningful and reassure us that something might exist beyond our death, whether it be offspring, or something we invented or created, or an inheritance we pass along to our heirs, or even just that vague sense of having "made a difference in the world", all of which take the sting out of death.

So, while we might not specifically think about death or dying when these things are threatened, they play the function in our lives and in our psyche of protecting us against the subconscious fear of death, and hence become infinitely more important than we would otherwise expect.

As psychologists, we're always on the look-out for disproportionate responses - reactions that conjure up greater emotional intensity than we might otherwise expect. When I notice it in myself, when I see that my emotional response to things changing against my will is bigger than the scope of the change, I cannot help but wonder if something deeper is feeling threatened. Maybe its because these "life projects" of mine that are threatened are more precious to me than I recognized. Maybe my identity as a professional, as a dad, as a multidimensional success, even as blogger are tied up in protecting me from these haunting realities. Some day I will die. I may or may not have much influence on when it happens. Someday all things I have worked so hard it will lose most of their value. Someday everyone who ever knew me will also be dead. Will I then cease to exist on earth entirely? Will producing something of enduring value or notoriety protect me against this? Is that what why I strive so hard?

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that motivation is a complicated thing, and that reducing human behavior to any one motivating factor is attractive, but faulty. The truth is, it's unlikely that unconscious death anxiety is the sole motivational force, just as it is unlikely that I do everything because of conditioning, social forces, repressed sexual urges, or attachment styles. The field of psychology has tended to trip over itself and lose credibility because it is inclined to posit comprehensive theories that reduce motivation to vast oversimplifications. But understanding how something like death anxiety might contribute, in a helpful, if not profound source of insight into this dilemma of how we so often love and cling to things that we intellectually renounce.

Beyond insight, I think I can begin to let go,...a little, if I connect on a daily basis to the reality that Jesus rescues us from the fear of death. Not by giving us a promise of an afterlife to cling to as another form of denial, but by transforming the very nature of reality, and the very meaning of our existence. In this reality of "the kingdom of God", we begin to experience a transcendence that allows us to move beyond our innate clinging to things, to preserving our life and denying the upcoming death. Perhaps those mysterious word of Jesus apply here, that as I lose my life, I gain it.