The Clearing of a Break
Living toward Death is a helpful but very awkward and uncomfortable way to understand one’s life. Every day we are reaching toward an end, whether it’s sooner or later, whose timing we do not control. It is uncomfortable and we spend most of our lives trying to run away from and avoid the idea of this certainty.
However, the more we choose to embrace the idea of Death as the inevitable end of existence we are rushing toward, the more we might free ourselves with our time left for the joyous and challenging activity of living.
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Picking your daughter off the sidewalk after an accident requires an extreme level of stoic focus. I tend to downplay my spouse’s common fears over the bumps and bruises our very active and determined kid receives through her day-to-day. But as I step onto a scene I’ve been called to, a certain look in both of their eyes reveals an instant signal to me of the severity of the situation. My disassociation with their emotions shifts into gear.
It’s a slow-motion internal gear grinding using mental mechanical power to hold back any desired response to seeing your child slightly broken on the concrete. Thousands of parents likely experience this when seeing their beloved go through a trauma, both acute or chronic.
There is something that pushes us to find this freedom of living toward death, some of us experiencing it more often and intense than others—we call it Anxiety. Without discounting the level of anxiety that exists in such a way that one may require medical or cognitive assistance, the typical anxiety that assails us suddenly on any given day at any given moment is a mood that we find ourselves in when we feel an uncanniness with life.
Perhaps as the most important mood, Anxiety works as a pointed disclosure of the absurdity of the groundlessness of our existence. We are not always aware of the defining cause of our anxiety, even when it hits. Anxiety is seen as a constant threat to one’s healthful existence so we flee from the disturbing affects.
But what if anxiety is seen as a bridge to a unique form of understanding which connects us to the finite realities of being here in this world? Perhaps grasping onto it as a tool for survival could create a clearing to see one’s own potential for life and progress.
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Once I moved through the blankness of pulling her off the ground and just focusing on getting her into the car without mangling her body to make it worse, things settle in mentally a tad more than before and the structure of emotions and negative thinking needs further shoring. Two separate selves are in combat as the dread sets in.
This seems at first to be a negative side affect of affection, but probably helps to strengthen and further solidify one’s love of their kids. The internal battlefield of supportive versus defeated thinking in an intense moment can push one through a bit of fear, but what’s laid bare when either one side wins out is a deeper connection to the subject. The more we put effort into figuring out what is right for our children, the more we encode our love for them.
The intense feeling of anxiety is an encounter with the “nothing” of existence, a rupture in life producing a crisis of meaning and a breaking down of what we perceive and see in our everyday worlds. Despite our discomfort of being face-to-face with anxiety, its shines a light on the oppressive and disturbing character of existence.
Imagine working with a tool that suddenly breaks while in operation. The working of the tool was simply in a state of doing the work, and we’re likely paying little attention to the tool in hand. But as soon as it malfunctions our perspective takes a sudden shift toward the system of relations of which it is part of as it is directed toward a specific task. Suddenly the way the tool works is disclosed to us, whether we want it or not.
Anxiety plays this part in our lives, suddenly disclosing the complex and confusing systems that surround our everyday lives. Systems we may not have been paying close attention to until we are struck by the sudden bright light of anxiety.
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I am both good at being a father, while also just flat terrible at it. I participate in any manner of things to help my daughter feel loved and to grow. I believe she knows how much I love her and I bring her into focus more and more as she grows. But it’s also fairly typical for me to be reactive to her in such ways that demonstrate bad patience and poor empathy.
While carrying her into the Emergency Room at the hospital I can’t help but reflect on these facts, and that sometimes I am not always particularly excited about being a parent. There’s nothing I would rather have more in my life yet I often do not live up to my own expectations. Failure stings on a day-to-day basis.
During the triage moments I want to get angry with how our medical regime is a waiting game of paperwork, billing, and mouse clicks before she gets a human to look into our eyes and truly focus on her trauma, but I hold to a dutiful spirit keeping my daughter close. At that point in time it’s just comfort and encouragement. Here it’s easy to again realize that I could be doing something better for her but instead try to be an oak tree. Thankfully her mom is there to bear the emotional burden as her guide.
When the world announces its presence with anxiety, our everyday existence falls into a sort of disarray, scattering meanings and interrelations, potentially pulling us away. It pulls us into a very inwardly focused understanding of our place in the world, taking us out of the everydayness that we typically live our lives within.
This everydayness is the place in which we hide from death. It is the place in which we run on a wheel passively. Anxiety is then the catalyst to recognize the nullity in being human and that we are living toward death. Anxiety is about death.
In our everydayness we tend to see death as something biological, a physical cessation of our organic bodies and minds. But with anxiety, we see death in an existentially significant way. Death becomes the single most integral aspect of being authentic, pushing us to recognize our mortality, that the uttermost possibility of non-being can occur at any moment.
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My sense of being a father is probably 60% about protection. When you see her on the gurney you simply feel then that the majority of your role was a swift failure. She’s frightened and in pain, and the system is doing what it does as a response, and now I am just there to sit and wait and make some A or B decisions.
I can respond but I cannot do much more. Even as she reaches out asking for my help. Her mother does more guiding as we move from one medical official to the next, from one thing in her body to the next, and thankfully the staff provides very warm encouragement and comfort for her too. The initial action slows into more waiting and comforting as I try to keep myself from scrolling mindlessly to escape the environment.
About here is when you begin to regret all the Dad Voice, or the not right nows. Or the pushing or the correcting. You regret and feel intensity for the friends who have lost their beloveds, or supported them through chronic episodes of pain or disease. You feel guilty for the intensity of feelings you face given how much worse millions of children around the world have it. Your mind wanders to the family whose world was coming apart in the waiting room, or toward the past and future patients of Room 6. And then you wonder what the better dad would feel and do in this moment, when you know she’ll actually be safe again soon, repaired, if it all goes right. And you just hope this is the worst of it and you will embrace her again soon.
When life is uncanny our natural response is to run from it. We quell the unsettling of anxiety by seeking the light over the darkness of it because it’s terrifying. We stick with the ethical mores of everyone else rigidly rather than facing up to the nearness of death as something to push us to embrace the things we know will give us more fulfillment to live for our ownness.
Once we can step in and out of an authentic mode of being through our recognition of the nearness of death, we have to take the resolute turn toward choosing to choose ourselves. This is the work from the insight anxiety brings to life about our nearness to death and our nothingness to live for our own ends as much as civility will allow. To provide care not just for others but for ourselves. Anxiety can provide freedom.
‘Anxiety,’ Heidegger writes in Being and Time (1927),1 ‘liberates [us] from possibilities which ‘count for nothing’, and lets [us] become free for those which are authentic.’ Anxiety is the call to consciousness of oneself and ones possibilities. Once we allow ourselves to be called into consciousness the ‘choice’ is already made—the situation is created based upon the actions we take stepping toward our authentic self.
Instead of fleeing this nullity, this nothing of life, facing it as the mood that can lift us up for a moment of vision in order to see ourselves through before death. We do not remain in this situation of authenticity forever as our existence typically lies with the everydayness of which we are not always steering. We all have to live a normal life, of course. But the more we can channel anxiety to slip us into ourselves and our consciousness, the more we might be free for our possibilities, the more we might be able to modify and clarify our relationships, and the more we might care for others and the world.
I’m obviously very heavily hanging this narrative directly on Heidegger’s philosophy and phenomenological analysis of anxiety and being here. However, a more popular and more inspiring interpretation of Heidegger was taken up by French existentialist Albert Camus on the “absurd” and living a passionate life. Read The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).