my healthy(ish) anxiety (a reaction to "the heart of buddha's teaching" by thich nhat hanh) -- written ~spring 2012

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown

I recently came to believe for a couple days that ceaseless happiness and uninterrupted internal peace (free from anxiety and fear of death) were both attainable and desirable for me. That was after I read The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh. The book’s imploration to live in the moment seemed to speak directly to me, since my mind is so often traumatized by anxious thoughts about the future, by insatiable desires to succeed in the world, by daily thoughts of my ultimately certain extinction.

The idea that I should stop, meditate, and become one with the present is appealing as a path to peace. And I think it’s a very important one to keep in mind, to be sure. The message that struck me hardest was that, no matter what my situation, there is always a way for me to focus on the beautiful around me, to treasure the little things – like my ability to read a book I enjoy and immersing myself in the text rather than worrying as the plot comes together whether I got a good grade on an essay I wrote, or by savoring a conversation with a friend during which I am fully present and attentive rather than half-ignoring her and living only inside my head while she talks because I’m so worried about something, or by taking a walk over Key Bridge and looking at the pretty Potomac during sunrise rather than pondering fearfully what the day ahead may have in store while missing the sunlight on the water.

Even the book’s discussion of death was reassuring up to a point – and simultaneously realistic in a scientific sense. He didn’t write wishfully about an afterlife that is experienced by an immortal soul distinct to an individual person. He wrote rather about waves in the ocean. A wave is made of the water beneath it, but, were it conscious, it would perhaps think of itself as having an independent existence that comes to an absolute end once it crashes against the shore. It sees other waves hitting the sand and disappearing, and it observes that this annihilation is its ultimate fate. But what the wave never realizes is that its independent existence is to a large extent an illusion. The hydrogen and oxygen and salt inside it, the components that constitute its existence, are constantly swapping places with the elements in the ocean below, so that the material of the wave and the material of the water beneath are in a permanent mix-up. It would be a tragedy for the wave to go through its entire life without realizing the unity between itself and nature.

And so it is with humans. We think of ourselves as independent beings. Yet so many of the atoms in our childhood bodies are there no longer, and so many of those cells have died. Even our minds are to such a large extent just products of our societies and cultures. We see the world through the concepts we have been taught since we first began to speak, since we finally started to think, and these conceptualizations in our heads constitute our consciousness, so that we as individuals are completely different because of where we were born and raised than we would be if we were born and raised elsewhere, in a different time, with different circumstances. Our free will, our free thought, and our independent minds are illusions – our will, our thoughts, and our entire minds are in many ways simply highly advanced products of forces we do not at all control. And when we die, we will decay and disintegrate, and the material that makes up our bodies will go on to make other bodies and individual humans, as well as insects and rocks and grass, and, much later, our matter will constitute other planets that will be around long after Earth is gone, and perhaps it will find its way even into stars that will eventually explode.

Knowing that I am a part of nature, and that all the matter that constitutes me will go on without me just fine, is somehow comforting for me. I am a wave.

The path to happiness, for me as a wave, is to be at peace with this world around me, to recognize myself as a part of nature and not distinct from it, to enjoy the sunlight and trees and books and people with whom I converse. I should not worry so much about the future – I should savor the present while I can and I should do it in a conscious way, knowing all the while that there is nothing to be afraid of when I hit the shore. There is not really an end. There is a transformation.

But then this whole discussion seems to miss the point of what it means to die, or perhaps rather of what it means to not want to die. It is easy to say there is nothing to worry about when it comes to death because you won’t feel anything after it’s over, because you won’t worry about anything, because you will not really end but will rather transform into a different phase of existence (grass, bark, bears, tigers, water bottles, stars, air). I suppose I could say that a lack of consciousness never bothered me in the billions of years before my birth, and so it won’t bother me in the billions of years after my death. And yet it’s this very transformation into an unconscious form of existence that I want to avoid – it’s the very fact that I won’t be able to worry, or be sad, or be happy that fills me with such a strong desire to somehow not go through with life’s inevitable end. It’s the very idea that nothing can bother me and that nothing can make me happy which I find so unsettling.

So The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching implores me to live in the moment, to not fret about the future, to savor everything in the present. But the paradox for me is that I find sometimes that thinking about death, worrying about death, is actually a catalyst for me to savor and enjoy the present moment. I find that when I am walking with a friend, the realization of my impending death and the worries this realization generates in my brain cause me to put everything in perspective about the present moment and to realize how valuable it is.

I find that worrying about the future helps me sometimes to seize the opportunities around me at the present. It is because I am worried about how well-read and intelligent I will be when I am 30 that I read so many books. It is because I am anxious about the fact I could die at any moment before I turn 30 that I try and enjoy the relationships I have with my friends while I can. It is because I fret about the impact I will have in this world that I have decided to go into teaching in order to make a local-level and personal and memorable difference, because I am so afraid of turning 60 and all I can say for myself is that I went to some interesting countries and have a good pension and my cubicle was comfortable. I know now that I want to pursue a career based on inspiring others to seize control of their lives and shape their own destinies in accordance with their own individual dreams. I want to make sure that, when I am 60, I can say honestly that I accomplished this goal as best as I could. Anxiety about the future can thus help produce so much value in my present, because by putting my present in the context of my future I am shaping my present in a positive way – in a way that serves my own needs, desires, and passions as an individual human being with only one life to live.

But I don’t deny that worrying about tomorrow can also impinge upon today by taking me too much out of the moment. I gave examples of how this could happen in the second paragraph.

Finding the balance is a challenge. Whatever the balance is, though, I think anxiety about the future and the uncomfortable knowledge of impending extinction can be healthy.