Anxiety and the War Against Time

What do Adam Ant and Bruce Springsteen have in common apart from their success as music artists? Their wrestle with mental illness. They've both suffered recurrent depressions. It led them both to engage in exhausting performance schedules to counter their perception of time, and replace the vacuousness of life with busyness and buzz. Their creative art elevated them into the world of stimulus; the adulation of performing before their fans offset the strenuousness of banal life.

Their stories remind us of a condition that's familiar to each of us.

Whenever we do nothing in life we may face uncomfortable truth - our existential state makes us known to ourselves and it can be too much. We may struggle in emptiness, loneliness, boredom, or for meaning in being here in a life that's uncomfortably big or small, where we're either too conspicuous or inconspicuous.

It's hard to distinguish whether a life busy with a plethora of distractions is the cause of our dilemma or just an agent. In previous eras of history, people were busy defending their lives in the quest for survival, or simply so used to working incredibly hard to make ends meet. And still, for so many today, us perhaps, those harsh realities are real. And still there's no escape from anxiety as an artefact of our plain existence.

Possibly more than ever we're faced with our raw and somewhat boring existential truth because we have the luxury of time; not enough meaningful things to do. Or the direct opposite causes us chagrin. Life is too big. The result is the same.

One thing is clear. We have trouble with time. Not enough of it. And certainly when we have too much. When we must be patient. And when we need to get our skates on.

We battle our fears for the facts of our anxiety in a dream nested in the hope of a vision we've been given, where time is both mediator and antagonist of reality.

Time, as we live it, is best a balance, and at worst, an enemy of our logicality, given the impossible dimensions of our expectations as they clash with our realities. Proof of this is how much past and future dominate our present.

Because of time, the mind roves, and in that roving there is, at times, no peace.

We want our time in certain aspects of it hurried on, yet when we reach the end of our lives we have regrets. With time, there's no win. God cannot satisfy us.

The gap between our expectations and our realities is filled with anxiety. If we're able to close that gap by refitting our expectations, our realities are emended with acceptance, and we suffer less anxiety.

Time interacts within the bounds of our expectations and realities, bringing anxiety into being, because time, together with our perception, makes us aware of more than we would prefer to experience. Too much information.

Time brings our expectations to life in the gap between our hopes and reality. Often, when our expectations are unrealistic, we face realities that are easiest avoided, and painful when we cannot evade them.

So how do we reconcile time in collusion with our hopes, spoken from our depths into our everyday lives through our expectations, and our perception of reality?

Time we must accept, and reality, too, if we're to reconcile anxiety for peace.

Our expectations are something we can become more aware of. Then we can drill deeper and explore our depth-founded hopes, and become curious about why they were put there.

Our hopes were put there long ago, and some of them we were born with. They prove we're not simply human doings, but beings with an eternal purpose in what we may perceive to be a transient life.

If we're able to accept the presence of garden variety anxiety, we can also accept that time is incomprehensively wondrous, if we can overcome through acceptance our fear that we cannot control time. Anxiety is a product of our difficulty understanding time.

The more we accept a mystery, the more we may simply marvel at it, which leads to peace.

We have about enough purpose in us for the single moment, and anxiety is productive in that it propels us into our present purpose.

Reality is the context of life, and anxiety, as a catalyst for purpose, is to be understood, accepted, and overcome, so contented existence is possible.

Steve Wickham holds Degrees in Science, Divinity, and Counselling. Steve writes at: http://epitemnein-epitomic.blogspot.com.au/ and http://tribework.blogspot.com.au/



 By Steve Wickham


Article Source: Anxiety and the War Against Time