Courage – Week 4
Where I reflect on Easter, life as chaos, preparing for death, and anxiety
‘Why are you looking for the living among the dead?’ This was the theme of our Sunday sermon. Easter celebrates resurrection. It is, therefore, also the triumph of life’s emerging chaos over the controlled certainty of death. It’s an invitation to lean into that influx of life, and the potential it carries, embracing its inherent randomness. For what I now call ‘Courage Week’, I set myself to do one difficult thing every day. What qualifies as ‘difficult’ is whatever lingers on my mind or to do list, and isn’t moving forward without proactive effort. This Easter sermon offered a new lens for me to look at those things I delay, and distinguish two forms of courage: one faces death, one faces life.
In the morning, over two long cafe sittings, I went through the suggestions of In case you get hit by a bus, a book to plan for your own death. I made a list of difficult things, turning vague worries into discrete actions: paper documents to gather in the same place, digital clean up, password aggregation, updating my will, final instructions, and asking my partner for the same. I culled photographs up to 2018, and reflected on various loaded relationships – some I neglected, some I keep holding grudges around. All this is courage in the face of death. It’s planning and sorting things to make life easier for others and for myself – clear the back end, so to speak, so that I have more energy to face the world.
There is another form of courage, though, which I also find myself prepare for. It is to do with life: fear of success, reaching outwards, letting the world in, and welcoming the related anxiety. All commitments involve a sacrifice of possibility.
Among the ‘difficult things’ I find myself doing, spending money is another recurring category. More specifically, what I find difficult is trading the open potential of cash, and its cushioning effect, against specific alternatives. I first heard of Bitcoin in 2013, and thought of buying some on multiple occasions, but never did, and still carry some regret. As a freelancer building a practice, I like to hold onto my padding of cash as a life-vest. Earlier in the year, I put $1000 in my superannuation, to look after my future self and benefit from government co-contribution. Pressing the button felt like courage – pushing past a fearful instinct to keep cash at hand, and bet on my future self.
More recently, I extended this courage to spend on specific resilience tools and techniques. My work on global catastrophic risk left a mark. I won’t unlearn my sense of systemic frailty, and see some reason in prepping. Last year, I made a list of things I wanted to learn and acquire in case our systems went wrong. One of those was a water filter: three days without, and you die. ‘Get water filter’ stood on my ASANA board for a long while, while I kept pushing back the due date. I acknowledged a blockage, and broke it down into steps. First I investigated options, then I selected what I wanted, then I found a vendor. By then, my brain offered all sorts of reasons not to take the last step. It was a silly prepper thing, paranoia, not worth it. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘either you buy it, or you take it off the to do list for good’. I wasn’t going to let it go, I had to take the plunge. I took a deep breath in, and forked $150.
Courage is a habit. The next time over was easier. Another thing on my list was first aid training: CPR, choking, wounds. This week, I took the jump, and paid $225 to St John’s ambulance. Instead of that sum in the bank to do whatever I want with, I may soon be capable of saving a loved one – or a stranger – in the case of emergency.
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Over the past four to six weeks, I’ve suffered from light anhedonia. Lower capacity to feel joy than I normally do. There’s a few too many things on my plate – twenty projects in total or so – there is nagging anxiety for a world out of bounds, but there is also neglect. Instead of holding firm to things that I know will nourish me, I let them go, and find myself looping in surrogate distractions instead, whether doomscrolling or playing silly games. Easter was a chance to pause and realise that my paralysis had been nothing more than good old anxiety.
A podcast series brings me back to readings of Kierkegaard, as a teenager, on the esplanade of the Invalides in Paris. I wrote a grandiose verse back then, inspired by his books ‘Oh temps délicieux d’une éternelle angoisse’. In my somewhat exalted youth, I welcomed a sense of shapeless fear in the face of overwhelming potential – much preferring it to the dull despair of self-betrayal, that I witnessed among many people around me. Whenever I feel the grip of anxiety, whether clutching my chest or churning in my gut, I take it as a reminder that I’m alive, and as Easter sermon reminded me, for that very reason, not in full control.
I have a dangerous tendency to play life on expert mode. In some video games, after initial rounds of familiarisation, you can select an option to make things more difficult for yourself: enemies are stronger, you lose energy faster, and there’s fewer magic mushrooms around to keep you high. I sometimes do the same in life. I set myself an ambitious goal (or more than one), and as I seem to get closer, think ‘oh, maybe that was too easy, what about adding a constraint?’ So, I will shift the deadline forward, or shrink the budget. If things works out – which they generally do, at least meeting the original parameters – my confidence grows, and I shift the baseline for future goals.
Over time, I think this subtle form of pride has taken a toll. To get things done, we need more than inner resolve. Conditions have to be met. As Easter should also remind us, we’re embodied beings, and therefore dependent on the world. To stay alive – meaning, for the chaotic potential of life to continue bubbling in us – we need energy, nutrients, and lubrication. Love doesn’t harm either, and a touch of pleasure.
What if accepting this inner neediness was a form of courage? Physical enthusiasm lies not just in an effort of the mind, but a surge of life from the body, which we control at best indirectly, and which we know to be transient. Caring for it as a condition of our action is a reminder of its impermanence. Mono no aware, as Japanese poets mumble with melancholy when the Sakura petals fall. Every time we drink, eat and be merry, something in the air reminds us that all this too shall pass. All happiness casts a shadow of grief.
I scheduled pause at Easter. I’d been flustered, and wanted to land things before stopping. There’s a new project on AI and China, a new project on atypical careers, a workshop series for queer Christians, a workshop proposal for the Ballet, and a book project. Crystallising those instead of idling in confusion and addictive games would lift up my mood. To get there, I needed a mood lift. In meditation, a mantra comes up: ‘not how I should be, but how I am’. I acknowledge my weakness, and lean into what I know to give me zest. I spend time in cafes for long morning stretches, lunch at the pub, an occasional sweet beer. I look for a nice book to read. I take a long morning call with a dear friend in the US.
On Good Friday, I spent a day leaning into the dapple of happiness and grief. I walked along the nostalgic neighbourhoods of my five kilometre radius, relishing the golden light of a warm autumn day and remembering the pandemic months. I meandered through the Carlton cemetery. Then I attended a Tenebrae service at St Patrick’s Cathedral. I made space for mellow feelings of sadness, and cried a little. Soon Easter came, there was a pistachio flavoured egg, a French adventure movie, fried chicken, and a fresh sprout of life for the second moment of the year.