Phoenix of Love

Sartre’s famous aphorism that “hell is other people” is backwards.

Hell is disconnected self-consciousness. Hell is the lack of other people.

A characteristically brilliant and frank recent post by Mona brought this to mind:

My biggest test for the last couple of years, though, has been feeling (relatively) alone in my quest for human interdependence. It pulls me back into my ego and pain like nothing else can…

Anything would be better than that certain disturbing air of nonchalance.

If you’re willing to be real at all, and even the least bit vulnerable, seeking your right approach to the challenges in life, that is beautiful. No need to pour out your heart and soul. But why do people need to pretend that they have everything in life figured out? How is that a good reason to keep everyone else at a distance?

Isn’t it odd how we’ve developed this instinct of creating hell for ourselves by pushing people away from our imperfections?

Someone once suggested to me that the most deeply personal experiences that we have—the ones we’re sure no one else could possibly understand—are the most universal. The tragedy is that we rarely find out, because we are so hesitant to share them.

Society, others’ expectations, and social roles, the popular scapegoats, are not to blame for this nervous nonchalance. We are.

Hell is the blind self-consciousness we trap ourselves in by worrying about imaginary judgment from others.

Yes, it’s dangerous to be honest. People might find us out: find out our imperfections, our failures, our mistakes; might find out that we are human, and—what? laugh at us? leave us?

Or people might understand us, so much that they can’t help loving us.

Anxiety is a uniquely human disease. It’s an unwelcome byproduct of our ability to imagine: to create a world in our minds that does not match the immediate input of our senses. Because we can feed these fabricated images and experiences back to ourselves, and because the less sophisticated parts of our brains lack the ability to distinguish between those imagined experiences and real ones, we can trigger the same biological fight-or-flight responses in our bodies that are meant to deal with real, immediate danger simply by thinking about hypothetical threats.

The book Stumbling on Happiness clued me in to some of these weird psychological wirings that we have. Another fascinating one that I’ve mentioned before is that we have enormous trouble disentangling feelings we are actually experiencing at the present moment from feelings we imagine ourselves to be having in hypothetical situations. An everyday example: when you’re inside a warm building, the idea of going outside into subzero cold doesn’t seem nearly as daunting as it does when you’ve been walking down the street into the wind for ten minutes. It’s nearly impossible to separate the current feeling of comfort and warmth from the imagined experience of walking in the cold.

There is a reason that anxiety does not exist in the rest of the natural world. Although nature is hardly the gold standard for human behaviour, it’s often a useful example; it’s had ridiculously long to work out the kinks and settle into successful ways of doing things.

Evolution, for example, is often a hugely useful approach to developing anything from poems to dishwashers to computer software. Evolution has no anxiety whatsoever. It constantly tests new variation, using the real world to eliminate the unsuccessful attempts. To evolve is to find the better way by messing up as much as you can, fearlessly.

With the Bahá’í Fast beginning tomorrow, I am reflecting on how often periods of quiet and calm are the breeding ground for surges of forward energy. It seems like perfect design that we have this sort of generative space built into every year, poised right at that juncture where the pendulum hits the outer edge of its swing, pauses, and tumbles back in the direction of spring.

One of the less fortunate qualities separating us from animals is the way that stress gets stuck in our bodies. Stress is handy for dealing with immediate threats to life or dignity, and if we never experienced it we would have a good deal more in common with cucumbers than with birds or dogs or iguanas. We’d have a little trouble in the motivation department. The issue is that something about consciousness and awareness of the future allows stress to get a bit too cozy in the human nervous system, and drastically overstay its welcome.

If you watch an animal that has been frightened, it is striking how quickly it relaxes again once the threat is gone. To an animal, there is no such thing as anxiety for the future. If the threat is there, the stress turns on; if the threat is not there, the stress turns off, like a valve has closed and the water has stopped flowing. For most humans, the valve never quite closes. It’s a drippy faucet. After a threat is gone, the stress hangs around and haunts us.

It’s like a friend from out of town that comes over for a holiday party and is great fun to have around, and then stretches out on the couch after the rest of the guests have left and before you know it you have an extra housemate.

Nothing wrong with them; it’s just not quite the right time to be hanging around.

I don’t believe in umbrellas. This means that I occasionally get drenched when for one reason or another I have to walk a longish distance outside in a torrential downpour.

The reason I decline umbrella protection, though, is that being drenched by rain is really not a traumatic experience at all.

For the record, I do NOT enjoy pulling my own teeth, walking on rusty nails, or eating dirt-encrusted pebbles. After being completely soaked by rain a number of times, I just don’t find it physically painful, emotionally upsetting, or damaging in any way, unless I happen to be carrying my birth certificate and don’t have a plastic bag handy to stick it in.

What is particularly great about forgoing umbrellas is that it reminds you how it feels to be exposed to many of the trivial things we protect ourselves from.

The umbrella is not a bad symbol for North American culture, actually. We are the insurance culture; we are ingenious at smoothing out the curves and spikes of any potentially unpleasant variation. That constant bombardment of caution and protection and insulation makes it easy to forget that it’s possible to be content and even happy in the rain; that it’s okay to go without an umbrella from time to time, or even often; and that we really aren’t risking much at all by exposing ourselves to the world a little more closely.

The occasional rainstorm can be a good nudge to the senses. We need those sometimes to remember to live in our own lives.

While walking around downtown at lunch time and on the way to the train station, I often notice how the hurried businesspeople barrel down the streets leaning forward as though it will somehow get them to their destination a few seconds quicker. Sometimes I catch myself doing this as well.

When I drove to work, there was a very close equivalent in the drivers who would speed past a car that was slowing down for the red light in order to get to the light a few seconds sooner. It wasn’t even about the destination itself, really; it was this almost visceral urge to continue moving ahead as quickly as possible.

This sort of intense, singleminded focus on sheer forward movement reminds me of an image from a novel  by Charles Williams that I read years ago. This one character is having a sort of mental breakdown, and has a dream or vision in which, among other things, he sees a clock whose hands are spinning dizzyingly forward as though rushing to their own end.

Sometimes, when I’m walking in the midst of one of those crowds that has developed that hurry instinct, and is tripping over itself trying to get to its end without experiencing any present whatsoever, I feel like just stopping right in the middle and standing still—just standing there and doing nothing.

Who says you can’t stand still in a city?

One of the reasons that this business of not thinking is both tremendously simple and surprisingly difficult is that it isn’t about trying not to think so much as not trying to think. It’s no good smashing thoughts down forcefully as they arise, like that arcade game where you bop the alligator heads with a mallet as they emerge from their caves. The way I think of it, thoughts are more like the pearl that accretes around a bit of dirt inside an oyster’s shell. The thought begins its existence as a sort of seed in my mind—a vague, nonverbal impression—and as I focus on it, it gathers more and more material, takes shape in words or images, and begins careening off other thoughts that happen to be lying around in the vicinity.

Not trying to think means letting the thought stay as that vague, shapeless impression, like a bubble that just floats around instead of popping on the surface of the water. We can’t spend all of our time forming pearls; sometimes we need a break.

I’m considering designating my bedroom a no-thinking area, to fend off the encroachment of work-related deliberation into my sleep. It could be healthy anyway to have at least one place where I can take a break from the continuous churning of my neocortex. I can’t imagine that excessive rational thought is any more wholesome than eating ten pounds of broccoli or lifting weights for three hours a day. The difficulty is enforcing a moritorium on deliberative thought. For some reason it seems to be nearly impossible to remember to NOT THINK in a particular place or at a particular time; it probably takes a huge preamble of habit-forming before it’s anywhere near airtight.

I found the entrance to the sky where I
could never hope to be, where I could see
empires of fog (upstaging my existence)
caught in trysts with stone insanity.
I found it slashed in walls so high
that all my thoughts collapsed beneath the ground
to thrash in luscious silence and rebound
against their obfuscating sophistry.
I found the entrance to the sky, and I
was nowhere; words and bounds broke off of me.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

— Middlemarch