anxiety

"When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought i would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all." (written from perspective of the character Cecilia in The Patron Saint of Liars)

People live their lives, constantly surrounded by anxiety. if they live long before dying, they end up in senility, worn out by concerns: a terrible fate! The body is treated in a very harsh fashion. Courageous men are seen by everyone under Heaven as worthy, but this doesn't preserve them from death. I am not sure I know whether this is sensible or not.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly.  Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars.  She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it..  The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through.  She may be crowded out of her own life -- she knows this for a fact and has always know it -- but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.

But this is human life: the war, the deeds, the disappointmrent, the anxiety.  Imaginations struggles, far to nigh, all human; bearing in themselves this good, that they are still the air, the subtle food, to make us feel existence.  This is the "goal" of the soul path - to feel existence; not to overcome lifes struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context.

A treasured friendship can replace regret and hatred and heal the old wounds of the mind. Such a friendship can provide sincere help, consolation and encouragement. These can be magic weapons for eliminating grief and anxiety. When your life is free from anxiety and grief, you will find food tasty, sleep restful and recreation enjoyable.'

Xu Xiangcai, Traditional Chinese Health Secrets

According to Buddhism, the deepest, most pernicious erroneous view held by sentient beings is the view that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self exists.  There is not such self, and deep down we know that.  This makes us anxious, since it entails that no self or identity endures forever.  In order to assuage that anxiety, we attempt to construct a self, to fill the anxious void, to do something enduring.  The projection of cognitive objects for appropriation is consciousness's main tool for this construction.  If I own things (ideas, theories, identities, material objects), then "I am."  If there are permanent objects that I can possess, then I too must be permanent.  If I can be identified with something permanent, the I too must have a permanent identity.  To undermine this desperate and erroneous appropriative grasping, Yogacara texts say: Negate the object , and the self is also negated.

But man has other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too, are few, but every bit as important as his physical requirements, yet not so simple. If they aren't met, they can be as devastating as physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death or a degree of living death - neurosis and psychosis.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass.  It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong.  But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable.  It had started on the day they’d clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever.  He felt certain of this.

The word secure comes from two small Latin words: se meaning "without" and cure meaning "care"--being without care, freedom from anxiety. Victor Hugo articulates this very special sense in this lovely couplet:

"Be like the bird
That pausing in her flight
While on boughs too slight
Feels them give way
Beneath her, and yet sings,
Knowing that she hath wings."