The Age of Anxiety - Not

Anxiety. Stress. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. These moods and conditions may represent the predominant emotional and mental qualities in our fast-changing world. As anxiety dominates how people think - and as the speed of business and social change overwhelms people's abilities to cope healthily - innovation and creativity will be affected. Sanjay Khanna, a writer, researcher and consultant for technology companies in consumer and enterprise markets, will discuss key implications of our age of anxiety for individuals, societies, cultures and innovative industries. He will also offer an antidote, which he calls "Realistic Sanctuary." - from upcoming Future Salon (free) talk October 21 by Sanjay Khanna

I'm not buying it: This Age of Anxiety meme. If you really want to conjure up a new meme I'd say it's The Age of Resiliency.

You're talking to a former nail-biting fidgeting restless soul. For a long time my restlessness was part of my mystique. Could be exotically camouflaged so it came across as an adventurous and very often hedonistic nomad. Couldn't pin me down. Free spirited. But underneath it all, I was driven to distract myself. And run run away. A bundle of anxious energy.

I ran across the Age of Anxiety post after penning a piece on the Next Five U.S. Natural Disasters for the Future Salon blog. But contemplating natural disasters doesn't keep me awake at night. Yet I was brought up in a household that was paranoid by any normal standards. Anxiety is in my genes. And anxiety reverberated through the walls and the cells of every member of our household as I grew up. Riding around the block on my bike was quite dangerous - according to my parents. So was going over to friends' homes that weren't part of the family inner circle. I think they were more frightened by monsters lurking under my bed than I was.   

My parents fled from Cuba in 1963 (or was it '62). I'm not sure they ever got accustomed to the U.S. There you walked over to a neighbor and chatted far into a sultry moonlit night on the porch. Or played dominos. They didn't have TV sets, my mom reminds me. So they knew each other. Trusted each other. That was Cuba, though, they said. But the truth is my mom is afraid of virtually everything - it's not about the country. I understand why: her own mom anticipated her own death "just around the corner" for well over 40 years. "This might be the last birthday party of yours I see"  haunted my mom's seven-year-old brain and her eight-year-old brain and... (you get the picture).

I started to learn that security was an illusion while working in the tech industry. It only takes so many layoffs and company shutdowns and acquisitions to catch the drift that a permanent position perhaps isn't quite so permanent. Maybe though I really glimpsed the ephemeral nature of life when my dad died in a matter of months in my senior year of high school and left my stay-at-home mom with three kids and no life insurance.

So where does a sense of security and groundedness come from?

I'm talking about the avian flu this morning with my housemate. It's his copy of National Geographic ("The Next Killer Flu" is cover story) that I've read for my future disasters and the future of disaster relief post. All this talk of disaster has him mention he's just reading about the invulnerability of the spirit. That we're more than simply our body.

I a "yeah right" smile. Nice quote to frame for our desk.

No one knows better than me those are mere words. I'm reading a 500-page book on the invulnerability of the spirit twice (lack of English-reading material contributed) just days before I am swept by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Trust Me Mere Words Have No Substance When the Rubber Meets the Road.

In a class I'm taking and helping to facilitate the powerpoint reads: "Identifying with the unchanging Self gives security and stability."

Nice.

Words. Not much in way of pointers to living that in practice in that statement on its own (the course does offer practice).

When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized, even one word is too much. - Fen Yang

There are secrets in there: realized and identified. Not read about or intuited or had warm fuzzies about or someone told me to believe this. Rob Wrubel, co-founder of Yoga Works and co-founder of Ask Jeeves!, asserts that people " don’t want packaged, commoditization of experience... I think people now are mainly interested in — not just an experience — but actual transformation of themselves." Peak experiences are passé, I want the whole kit and kaboodle - uh, whatever that means.

I was really taken by the story of former stockbroker Alison Brown whom jammed with bluegrass bands since high school and participated in banjo and fiddle contests on weekends. While selecting universities, she consulted the number of listings in Bluegrass Unlimited for that college town to make the ultimate decision. Today, her company Compass Records has been called "Nashville's hippest alternative label."

"When you understand the soul of your business, you almost instinctively know which risks are worth taking." - Alison Brown in "The Banker and Her Banjo", Worthwhile Magazine, Sept/Oct 2005 (story not online)

Those so-called risks become inspired certainty when you know intimately the business of your soul.

So consider this a pre-announcement for Forty Days to I"m Still Coming Up with Name. Perhaps: Forty Days to Recovering the Business of Your Soul? I've struggled to really cover resiliency and fearlessness and even this quote's application in day-to-day life in any one comprehensive blog post. Basically you train like one trains for a marathon, but instead of sprints and long runs and leg presses, it's mind training. Basically you live it. Make practical ("your life is not divided between your spirituality and your mundane existence but is so intimately interwoven that there can't be a difference.").

I'm offering an online course with individualized coaching for your own daily practice (need not include meditation, I'm working with your passions, time, disposition, etc), and we'll work in buddy groups of three. I'd do it for free if I could right now because I believe these teachings are priceless. $175 (paypal my email address crossroadsdispatches -at- gmail -dot- com). (Absolutely free for Katrina victims.)  Rolling enrollment through the next few weeks, whenever I've got three participants raring to go, another group begins. More later.

Bonus: Snippet from "meditation or margaritas?", Jan/Feb 2005, Breathe magazine

There's normal stress, and then there's holy crap, I'm vibrating stress. Prior to last year I'd only experienced the first kind--what the average person goes through doing basic stuff like working, paying bills, breaking up with someone. All stressful, all manageable with yoga and meditation. For some reason, this made me think I was equipped to deal with anything. I didn't realize that my coping mechanisms were barely being tested until people around me started dying.

The first life-altering event was a phone call from Marnie, one of my best friends for more than a decade, telling me she had cancer. Not just any cancer, either--always the overachiever, she joked angrily, she had a rare form that packed a 90-percent fatality rate. I muttered feeble things like "don't worry" and "you're going to be fine," then paced around my apartment as my chest squeezed shut. I couldn't think of anything to do but unroll my yoga mat; there, as soon as I put my hands to my heart in namaste, I just cried.

"Lead us from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality" was the translation of the Sanskrit chant I ended my classes with. Easy to say until I watched my 34-year-old friend sign her will.

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Comments

[Niti Bhan]

"Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1749-1832

[Irina]

Wow, your family reminds me a lot of mine, and mine's not even from Cuba or any other place where people normally trust each other! : )