A little girl nearly stumbled into me at the laundromat. She began speaking what appeared to be gibberish as her father yelled for her to return. I could, however, hear what she was saying and can therefore attest it was not gibberish. She was apologizing for nearly colliding with me. Had I been as quick on my draw as she was on hers, I’d have congratulated her for averting the near-hit. I could hear her in the frenzy and I made the conscious decision to ignore her for I knew that my witty comeback was not in the lexicon at the time. Had I stopped in my movement adjacent to her direction of travel I would have stopped in my tracks and collided with her. That’s a near-miss. “Look they nearly missed.” Some people don’t hear anything but gibberish and can tune out the background noise. My mind gets hung up on those passing moments. Time stops for no one though, and neither do people on the move. And I kept moving. I felt myself rude for not addressing what this young girl said to me until I remembered something from a conversation the day before.
A couple of people in my life were sharing about their social anxiety. Though we had been in University with one another for several years now, I could see that this disclosure in and of itself was a difficult task. And they bore their fears of the “eyes upon them” in a crowd or of not knowing what to say. To which I suggested,
“I have heard it said that when we are experiencing anxiety and are aware of every little tick within our bodies, to the people looking upon us, IF they can detect our anxiety they may only notice one or two things.”
Moreover, I suggested that to the vast majority of people we encounter during our lifetime, we are simply non-playable characters (NPCs) in their own stories. The brain has to filter some stuff out, after all. And most people do this by not being great listeners or being particularly observant of their surroundings. If you haven’t experienced significant life trauma or were trained to pay close attention to detail, why would you focus your limited energy on someone you’ll never meet or see again?
It is a way of rationing and managing one’s attention. Many of us in the social work program lack those sensory-gating valves. It can be an affliction but it can also be a curious social experiment. Simply put, most people just don’t notice you. This CAN be a lonely proposition, but in the context of social anxiety, I believe it can be LIBERATING. If most people don’t see me mess up, it’s like I get a reset switch to try it out again. You know, like when you trip and get up real quick before anyone notices?
And this can be further demonstrated. As one of my classmates was describing his anxiety, I looked through him to the person behind him, an older man watching and listening. I could see three or four body reactions that suggested my classmate was anxious. Three or four of the 10,000 things that come into our minds when experiencing anxiety. And looking forward towards the man watching, he paid no attention to my classmate’s apparent “clues.” He appeared warm and non-judgemental. If he did notice these things they did not visibly vex him. Perhaps these were feelings he had reconciled with, not abandoned or banished, but reconciled with years ago.
The cog that suddenly becomes aware of its position in the wheel may stop in its revelation and may even cripple the other gears. It may even do so out of malice for all those years not telling it that it was a cog. And maybe that is where a lot of us are at right now. To what end, though? If the hand starves the stomach to teach it a lesson for its laziness, the hand sees its agenda through to its own demise. The hand starves to death along with the stomach and the rest of the body.
That is like a tumor. It grows in power feeding on the very thing that gives it life until it kills itself along with the host. That is not a symbiotic relationship. Can we not see that we are a symbiotic species? We have co-evolved and coexisted with a litany of other species throughout the anthropological record. We move around the globe finding ways to exist in climates as lush and they can be disparate. And this does not happen within a vacuum. The birds tell the people when to move. The grazing animals tell the people where to get water. The water nourishes the plants and animals the people feed on. The people live and coexist with other people to steward one another and the land they mutually depend upon. The people grow old and die. A mound is raised and funeral rites performed. The people’s bodies return to the dirt to feed new life.
And it repeats. Our positions in life, be they war or harmony, are scaled intimations of our very planet and inward to the biological lifeforms that animate our being. Does the white blood cell question its position in the battle against a foreign virus? Our bodies are constantly at war with itself to maintain homeostasis, a very narrow pH balance of 7.35-7.45. Consciously slowing or increasing one’s breathing can temporarily influence this balance. Think about that! Conscious breathing as war on the body!
We are the thinking cells. Enough of them come together to concentrate our thoughts into this form of intelligence. And if we think about our own battles - internal and external - they are but scaled versions of anything and everything happening all at once It is only terrifying if we think it all concentrated on ourselves, which we often due in acute periods of anxiety. Everything seems so insurmountable. However, the way we structure the foundation of our worldview will have an effect on those natural human experiences.
There was a Taoist monk who was entertaining a conversation between his students on the merits of the Buddhist doctrine “Life is Suffering.” The students were distraught with their own foibles and emotional anguish. To which the Taoist monk instructed the most animated of his students to draw a glass of water from the lake they were bemoaning next to. The student complied and when he brought his master the glass of water he told him to add a cup of salt to the cup and drink it. The student tried but quickly spit the salty drink out in disgust.
“This is your suffering,”
said the master. He emptied the saltwater and this time instructed the student to fill the glass to its brim with salt.
“Now pour this salt into the lake. Stir the salt until it has mixed well.”
The student proceeded to do so.
“Now drink.”
The student found the water crisp and refreshing, as the spring-fed lake was situated atop a snow-capped mountain, as clear as it was satiating. Then the master spoke:
“Our suffering held to our own vessel is too much for any man to hold. Even a sip can be unbearable. Most of us see ourselves as the first example, our suffering confined to a salty cup.
But if we understand who we really are, we can see ourselves as the second example. The lake, as expansive as it is, could hold one cup, two cups, three cups, each equivalent to a life’s worth of suffering and still remain refreshing, clear, and hold a lifetime’s worth of experiences, both the good and the bad, washing away our subjective viewpoints as the salt becomes indistinguishable from the water that provides us the very minerals and nutrients required for life.”
Suffering still comes. Anxiety still comes. These emotions cannot be denied in the forms we are born into. These emotions are however experienced differently and do not bear the same grip on us as our alienation from one another is dissolved like the cup of salt. Our anxieties, fears, and flailing appear again and again through the ages reflected back on us through examples of people we meet and see and places we go and stay. Our own bodies and actions reflections to others, the whole thing goes around again. Same story, new faces. How is going to look this time?