Fear

I am afraid.

I had another topic all picked out for this week, knew what I was going to say, even which photographs to use, but then I became afraid.

Let me tell you about this fear, because it is instructive. Things are in a bit of flux at work. My role there is shifting and I am uncertain whether or not the new role is a good fit for me. I might have to look for other work. This scares me. (In the service of full disclosure, there are other factors: things going on with my parents, issues around money in our own lives, but this is the main one).

Here's the thing, though. This is a place where I have seniority over every other member of the nursing staff. I am respected and liked there. It is good work. And if I looked for other work it would be within the same institution and the same profession (with the same pay and same benefits, or better). And if I couldn't find other work accorded to my needs, I could just stay where I am indefinitely, perhaps not as happy as I could be, but perfectly fine.

(There is one mitigating factor I should mention: I am 56 years old and have every intention of retiring at 65. What this means is that if I am going to jump jobs I should probably do it soon; I would think that most employers would rather not hire someone who is going to be with their department only a few years and then start on the downhill slope to retirement. So, I do feel a bit of pressure, though not much, not really, since, as I said, I could just as easily stay where I am).

The point I am trying to make is not that I am a big baby to be afraid (though you may draw that conclusion if you wish). My real point is that I have very little control over the fear I feel or its degree. The small mind sees every threat as being essentially equivalent. This little tempest in a teapot is no different to my mind than a charging rhino (well, OK, maybe the degree is different, but you understand what I mean). I wonder why this is? I also wonder what one does about it.

The Dharma says that fear is a response to conditions, that like everything else in our world it is composed of one condition piled upon another until is appears to be real. When I think of conditioned existence, the image which speaks to me is of the Oogie Boogie Man in "Nightmare Before Christmas", a being who has no independent form at all, but is a burlap-enclosed bundle of smaller creatures. Toward the end of the movie, you recall, the covering unravels and the bugs run away, leaving nothing at all of Oogie Boogie. As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, "there is no there there". There is no reality to...well...most everything. Yes, I know how very real things feel, but that is just because of the solidity of the illusion. In Pali this is known as anicca, generally translated as impermanence.

All conditioned things are impermanent and all things are conditioned. When we say "conditioned" what is meant is that nothing in this world can arise without that which allows it to arise and that which arises from conditions will also pass away. We sometimes live in the delusional state of thinking ourselves independent of what surrounds us, but this is just an intentional blindness to reality.

A flower arises because of the seed or rhizome that was its source. The flower arises because there are the conditions of soil, water, air, nutrients, microorganisms and such that make it possible for it to arise. In the course of things, the flower lives its lifespan and comes to an end. The elements that made up the flower re-enter the cycle to become whatever is next for those molecules, perhaps me!

This cycle is no less true of Reid or a mountain or a table or a house. Just because dissolution and decay take decades or centuries is no proof against the certainty of them. Mountains arise from the conditions of motions of the Earth's crust and magma, the conditions of water and air and wind and weather. They are worn away by the same forces and, absent new eruptions or extrusions, our world will eventually be one large, flat mass. Everything is rushing toward an equilibrium of flatness, except that the rushing in this case is occurring over eons. It is an odd fact of human consciousness that we tend to think of that which we cannot perceive as nonexistent. There is far more to the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light, but what we cannot see cannot be seen, as far as we are concerned. Similarly, all things are passing away, but because of our limited sense of time, we can act in most cases as if it is not so.

Does all this help with my fear? Well, the rational part of it, sure. But the fear remains, its own free-floating creation made up of my mind's insecurities. The truly irrational, self-sustaining, cyclical aspect of this type of fear is that what the mind fears is dissolution of the known, the familiar, and yet there is nothing but dissolution. This is, I believe, what Yeats meant when he wrote that "the centre cannot hold..."

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

He was speaking of the Second Coming, but it seems to me that this is the nature of the world. This is certainly what the Buddha taught and thought. What causes suffering is resistance to the core truth that there is nothing which lasts in its present form. Not you, not your child, not Mt. Rainier. Nothing. Life is nothing but loss. The key realization is not that this is so, but that this is not a problem.

Nor is the fear. It is only a problem to the extent that I let it be in charge and run my life, to the extent that I resist and try to change it into something it is not or solve it with something that cannot (food is my favorite, of course, what's yours?)

An essay by Karen E. Bender in today's New York Times Book Review said something that gets to the heart of why I write all this into my blog:

Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it...doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling--instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. The process of assigning the experience a beginning, a middle and an end, of giving it form, is a way of mastering it. Each sentence contains the chaos--our experience becomes what we perceive. And the honesty in these perceptions...creates a bridge to another person.

I am afraid. I am alive. I am dying. I am courageous. I am free if I wish to be. There is no problem that is not me. There is no solution to any problem that is not within me. It is enough. Thank you for being with me on this journey.