Abstract: worry too much. worry about worrying too much. The economy, politics, crime, overpopulation, poverty, my health, my car, my bad habits, environment... worry about abstract stuff and particular stuff, and things probably can't change. non-specific worry, a fearful feeling with no particular thing or event attached to it. Call it anxiety, worry, fear, heebie-jeebies ... by any name, it still makes you miserable. get stressed over my job, money, personal relationships, lawn that needs mowing. We read a lot about stress and how to deal with it. To me, stress just means worry with a fancy name, up-market, white-collar thing. These days, hierarchy of ailments to have, stress gets you more points. Conventional wisdom seems to say justified having stress. You can project stress outward, onto a thing, situation, or event. Take job-related stress, for example. They say you can even get disability for it. Who ever heard of getting disability for worrying? Blame your job, noise, money, other people - stress happens to you, a victim of stress. So myth goes. But worrying you do - you create it, do it, accusing finger points, you're a worrier. Worry and stress, or course, just amount to socially acceptable names for Stress we've made into a thing, reified it into object there. Since it exists outside ourselves, we can't change it that easily. Worry seems like more of activity, a habit. But who can change a habit? A habit appears as a thing, too, outside you, alien, beyond your control. Thus with words, we evaluate our inner lives as things. We hurt ourselves unnecessarily by conceiving of experiences and activities as objects and forces outside ourselves. What about fear? Fear Thingified William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch shows us fear thingified. So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. leaped up screaming I got fear! and ran out of house. He doesn't say fear of what, just the fear. Another case of fear a thing you can get, catch, etc. But my own experience of fear here and now consists of such events as faster heartbeat, sweating, rapid breathing, or perhaps holding breath, and other physical-emotional feelings more difficult to describe, shivers, prickling of skin, hair standing on end, an explosion inside, a knot gut, various pains, a feeling of things closing in, time slowing or speeding up. Part of felt experience of fear we just cannot describe words. Whatever you say it is, it goes on in here. We experience fear inside. Yet we conceive of, speak of, think of fear as, not exactly object, but some kind of thing, force, entity, and thus we alienate ourselves from our own mind-body experience - making it more difficult to deal with fear, making it easier to project fear into future where we call it We turn other experiences into things. say that a cold, or flu. Again, we turn experience, i.e., fever, aches and pains, congestion, upset stomach, depression, etc., into a thing that we have or get. What do we mean, get or Do own a cold, way own a shirt that have? Can buy one, or find one my garage? Of course not. But supposedly can give my cold to you, and keep it at same time. And so we use language without discriminating. We turn a mind-body experience of discomfort and pain into a thing out there, object, a cold or flu. In our evaluating, this entity flu has a life of its own, we perceive a frightening, uncontrollable enemy alien that attacks and invades us. Does this manner of portraying inner experience help us? Might we find a better way, a more immediate, present, way of evaluating a cold, or fear, or anxiety. …
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-12-22
Language: en
Type: article
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