Anxiety

I entered time on September 14, 1973, emerging from my mother's womb with Wilms' tumor growing inside me and heart failure on the way. I neither chose to be born, nor chose to be sick. Accordingly, I was never free. Moreover, despite my ability to think the timelessness of non-being, I can't escape the fact that this thinking occurs in time, of which I never chose to be a part.

I don't have the freedom that the culture promises. Instead, I have capitalism's ceaseless stream of illusory choices, which lead to "decisions" about what to spend my money on, what to watch on television, which political party to support, etc.

Every decision that I make is a decision to conform. 

My decisions also lead me to exploit the poor people from other countries who make the stuff I choose to buy. The human suffering that went into the manufacture of the keyboard on which I type and the screen at which I look is unimaginable.

As a willing participant in the system of universal suffering, I am guilty.

As a forced participant in the system of universal suffering, I am a prisoner.

I am anxious, dizzy, and nauseated whenever I think about my lack of freedom - whenever I think about the ways in which my actions, even those that I do with the best intentions, harm someone somewhere.

My divorce, my selfishness (have you noticed the blatant adolescence of what you're reading now?), my dislike of all types of authority, my insistence on universal honesty...I've harmed my ex-wife, my children, my friends, my family, you name it...

Why can't I simply love?

Why am I so afraid?

What frightens me so much?

Why am I ANXIETY?

Over the years, I've come to realize the essential absurdity of my existence and that this absurdity derives from the simple fact that I was born. My birth set me up in a paradoxical relationship with the eternal. I come from the eternal and will return to it. The fact that I'm being in time only for a short while means that the suffering wrought by my guilt will eventually cease. Knowing that suffering has an end makes the pain of being just as temporal (and absurd) as capitalism's choices are illusory.

I am ANXIETY.

But I am also a being in which anxiety occurs. We all are, because we carry the temporal and the eternal within us. We all carry - in our best, most enlightened moments - the awareness that the peace of the eternal, the peace of our ceaseless striving, will come not only when we die and leave the temporal realm, but when we discover it time and time again in states of pure being.

We see pure being through windows...windows to eternity that open for us sometimes by surprise and sometimes through effort.

My windows?

John Coltrane, The Beach Boys, My Bloody Valentine, Mia's laugh, Gwen's smile, Katie's diligence and beauty, Joe's selflessness, my parents' strength, my sister's example, Patti Smith, William Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Peter Gabriel, Jean Genet, Soren Kierkegaard, Michel de Montaigne, reading, writing, singing, conversing, exercising, meditating, Guinness, Roberto Clemente, Sandy Koufax, baseball...my cancer...my heart failure...

I yearn through my windows.

What are yours?

How do you love?

How can you love me enough to read these words?

How can I love you and myself enough to write these words?

I'm not anxious right now - I feel eternity and immortality crystalizing in my soul.

THIS IS FAITH.