Think of something you stress about that you know is not as significant as it feels, some small thing that takes your focus away from what you know is bigger, deeper, and more important. Want freedom from small anxieties, so that you can express your potential, and be clear and in control?
You may be struggling with what Irvin Yalom called groundlessness. Everyone does to some extent.
The big things you can do in this life are unmeasurable and make you face yourself. It’s scary. Groundlessness is what you experience when challenged by the freedom and responsibility you have for your choices in the world, contrasted with your need for stability and structure.
Your real bids for purpose force you to question if what you’re doing matters.
Damn, bro.
Wrestling small, seemingly solvable anxieties evades the big question. So you fixate, even though it’s not really about whatever you’ve locked onto.
*Everyone in world nods head
Excessive anxiety about small things is a way you hide from your potential. This redirection of energy is like a heckler throwing off a basketball player about to shoot free throws. It’s a sneaky mechanism the psyche creates to protect us from challenging ourselves.
I’m a little embarrassed.
I’m going to New York in three weeks to teach a pop-up in East Hampton. It’s a yearly thing. I get to see old friends, and meet new students. One of my best corporate coaching contracts came from one of these trips.
I’m anxious about what to pack, if I can fit in a haircut with my friend Sarah, and see one of my teachers the one free day I’ll have in the city before heading out East.
I have nice clothes. I’ll either see these people or I won’t. None of this can have a massive impact on my life.
These silly things are not what truly cause anxiety. The underlying energy of our biggest existential doubts leads us to find manifestations of anxiety that take shape based upon the current context. In different moments of life, in completely different places, it is that feeling, not the surface stuff.
Perhaps more embarrassing is that as I write, there are browser windows open to summer sales on websites that offer my favorite Japanese brands.
I don’t need anything new – I really don’t – but what if the perfect pair of pleated, slouchy, yet structured pants with a new short-sleeve button-down would complete me for my trip?
Wait, why do I need new clothes to feel complete and prepared? It’s not about the clothes, and it’s not about this particular example.
It’s not the thought that counts. It’s the feeling of the thought.
This feeling is familiar, and you have one also. It’s a frequency that finds something on which to dwell to keep us from experiencing groundlessness – but groundlessness is exactly what we must allow ourselves to feel in order to do our best work.
To do our best work we also have to do nothing. Nothingness is essential to excellence because it makes you ok with groundlessness.
Lie down on the floor for a while and watch yourself trying to do a bunch of things. What does it all feel like? You don’t need words – actually better without them.
The over-urgent frequency is a pendulum that needs the weight of your attention to survive. The psyche picks whatever this season’s fixation is, and we consider it to be the distraction, the problem – but the real issue is deeper.
Excessive anxiety about small things is a way of borrowing structure.
A small worry has dimensions you think you can measure. The night before the Yellowstone retreat a couple of weeks ago, I caught myself fixating on rearranging paintings on the walls in our house rather than reviewing my curriculum – or doing nothing.
If you want to overcome the sway that small worries have over you, you must learn to do nothing, to leave your phone and your worries behind and actually feel the thoughts instead of think them.
I did nothing last night by camping out with some friends. Nature is just the fucking best. I barely slept – sometimes sleeping out in the wild is like that – but after feeling utterly drained from the last month, I feel an inner wave of clarity building – from just one night.
Small anxieties aren’t random. They are an unconscious dissociative tactic I might find in relatively innocuous time-wasting like browsing Japanese pants online, or could be far more dramatic and damaging. The psyche thinks it protects you by turning your eyes to what appears finite.
Once I move the painting to another wall, I’ll be fine.
Except no.
The real fear of facing the ineffable groundlessness of being is immeasurable, which is exactly why the antidote is nothing.
Nothing can be an immense and terrifying void in which you have no significance, or it can be a few minutes resting on the floor during which you relax one micro-layer of apprehension, and gain just enough confidence in your ability to hold yourself that you do it again, soon.
We sure tend to make small things too big, huh?