WELCOME TO HELL! OUR NEXT STOP HEAVEN!
James R. Fisher,
Jr., Ph.D.
© August 11,
2015
“The mind is its
own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
NOTE:
This is a short excerpt from Self-Confidence: The Illusive Key to Health
and Happiness. It should be ready
for publication in late Fall 2015.
There is no time in which anxiety, free
floating or otherwise, is of greater intensity than during those halcyon days of
college.
Rollo May devotes a good deal of his book The Meaning of Anxiety (1977) to anxiety and its development of the self. College, compressed into a short number of years, isolated from the real world, and confined to variable ideas, theories, truths, facts, myths and biases, is a time of much anxiety and agitation.
Rollo May devotes a good deal of his book The Meaning of Anxiety (1977) to anxiety and its development of the self. College, compressed into a short number of years, isolated from the real world, and confined to variable ideas, theories, truths, facts, myths and biases, is a time of much anxiety and agitation.
Uncertainty, depression, stress,
distress, confusion, and anxiety compete for the student’s constant attention.
And if that were not enough, associated demons play havoc with the student’s
dreams while asleep.
When I am in a state of anxiety, a variation
of two dreams dominates. One, I am afraid to get my grades for fear I
have flunked out. Mind you, I graduated from university a half century
ago. The second dream, I have forgotten my class schedule – what class I
am supposed to be attending, where and what time – and find myself lost on
campus. I encounter students rushing to class, but am too embarrassed to
ask them where my class might be meeting. I wake up in a cold sweat, and
go to my study to write, unable to sleep the rest of the night.
Someone might look at my accomplishments,
then at my comfortable existence, and say, “How is that possible?” Soren
Kierkegaard had the answer:
To venture causes anxiety, but not to
venture is to lose oneself. So it is too that in the eyes of the world it
is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. But
not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully
easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most
venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it
were nothing – one’s self. For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then
life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all – who
then helps me? And, moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest
sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of
oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages . . . and lose my self!
What of that? [5]
Long before I knew Kierkegaard’s words,
I was stumbling and bumbling along, and ineptly but diligently embracing my
resistance to my anxiety. I found it true that the creative imagination
is stimulated by accepting anxiety as real with lessons to teach us, that it is
important to resist the urge to find safe haven in some cage.
Each of us has a role in life to play
involving the positive aspects of our selfhood. We develop as individuals
as we confront, move through and overcome anxiety-creating experiences.
There have been many people along my long life that have opened the door of my
cage, which I have not always heeded. When I have, the road ahead became
easier.
IS KAFKA’S
TRIAL OUR OWN?
How often I have heard variations of
Kafka’s lament in his book The
Trial (1925):
Someone must
have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong
he was arrested one fine morning.
It is a novel of vast symbolism and a bracing
psychological study of a system whose leaders are convinced of their own
righteousness. To some the court is a symbol of the Church as an
imperfect bridge between the individual and God. More pertinent to today,
it appears more likely a symbolic bridge between corporate society and economic
security.
It is a challenge to trust the “system”
to produce the leadership necessary to bring about social justice along with
comfort and security to individuals collectively in that society. No
surprise, given the speed with which technology has emasculated society, Western
civilization in particular and the rest of the world in general is failing
badly in leadership.
This implies that the burden of the
responsibility of leadership is a few individuals and not the responsibility of
the individual. Note:
There is no way a few individuals in leadership roles can bridge the gap between the ideal and the real in the world of everyday life by themselves. What happened to Joseph K happens every day because the passive majority expects their wishes to materialize without any effort on their part at all.
Everyone is a leader or no one is a leader.
There is no way a few individuals in leadership roles can bridge the gap between the ideal and the real in the world of everyday life by themselves. What happened to Joseph K happens every day because the passive majority expects their wishes to materialize without any effort on their part at all.
Plants close, jobs disappear, industries
evaporate, communities become lifeless, values change, as well as sacred
beliefs, skills become anachronistic, positions become atavistic, neighborhoods
are erased from the map to make way for progress, and in a crushing state of
anxiety, fingers are pointed in all directions except back at the individual.
In this crippling sense of anxiety, who
do we elect to public office? Do we
elect people who remind us of our leadership responsibility? No, we elect people who promise us to ease
our pain, create jobs, and improve our circumstances. We elect counterfeit leaders to perpetuate
our counterfeit existence, and wonder why we become increasingly dependent
suspended in our own self-pitying misery.
Although we are repeatedly disappointed
in leaders who make promises that they cannot keep, we cannot rise to accept
the fact that leaders are probably as lost as we are. What is a person to do when he has done
nothing wrong? But is that true?
We can’t change the world to fit us but
we can change ourselves to fit the world. Managing anxiety involves the
self-development of the self to an ever-changing world. W. H. Auden
captures this in The Age of
Anxiety (1947):
. . . . it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry – “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
We remain architects of our destiny no
matter how much we would prefer giving that role to someone else. In the
end as in the beginning, all we ever have is ourselves to blame.
*
* *
REFERENCES:
[1] Rachel graduated with honors from a
top prep high school. With advanced courses already completed in high
school, she will register as a second semester sophomore as she enters college
in the fall of 2014.
[2] This tense experience is given a
novelist treatment in A Green
Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa During Apartheid (2014), which is available on Kindle.
[3] See James R. Fisher, Jr.’s
unconventional approach in Confident
Selling (1971, 2nd edition
2014), as well as in A Green
Island in a Black Sea. Long before
he was acquainted with Edward de Bono’s Lateral
Thinking (1977), he was practicing the approach. For example, Confident Selling looks at the prospect as a partner not an adversary,
and the selling of systems not products or services.
The titles of other books follows this lateral
thinking theme (Work Without Managers: A
View from the Trenches (1991, 2nd edition 2015), The Worker, Alone! Going against the Grain (1995, 2nd
edition 2015), Meet Your New Best Friend (1996,
2nd edition 1996, 2nd edition 2014), Six Silent Killers (1998, 2nd edition 2014), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant
Workers (2000, 2nd edition 2014), and Time Out for Sanity: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2007,
2nd edition 2015). All of these books are available on Kindle or TATE Publishing Company.
[4] The memoir is In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A
Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003, 2nd edition 2014).
[5] Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, Princeton
University Press, 1941, p. 52.
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