Modern Anxiety

Anxiety is resistance to the call of living fully. It is a refusal to stop and breathe. To look around and to look within.

Anxiety is resistance to the needs of the Soul.

Robert Bly said the Soul is like the vertical dimension of life. This is a good way to put it. But no one can say what the Soul is exactly. And in our age of technology and shiny surfaces and optimization and the reducing of ourselves to chemicals in the brain, this indefinability makes us believe it isn’t real.

But the soul is like the air we breathe. It pervades all we do. It colors all we do. It is the ground of who we are. Hold your breath and you turn blue, tremble, and eventually die. Deny the soul and the warning signs progress as well, but more slowly — worry, hurry, overscheduling, overwhelment, uncertainty about who we are and what we’re doing in this life, and heart attacks.

Our kids especially are anxious. Suicide rates for children in the US have been climbing since the eighties. Our culture has been powerless to address this. This is because our children are in search of soul and we are a soulless society.

We have lost connection to the deep, sacred chords of nature, to the raggedness and beauty of woods and fields. To the unexpected jewels we find when we are allowed to wander. We have lost connection to the raggedness and beauty of our inner forest too. To the rainstorms of anger, the tides of grief, and the sunlight of joy.

Last night I put my arms around a redwood tree and pressed my cheek against its shaggy bark. When I got home, I did the same with the towering palm tree in my yard. Doing this connects me to something that goes below and beyond all human chatter — to the unbridled complexity of existence, to our sacred connectedness, to the sacred fullness and beauty of Life. To what only a poet can come close to describing.

In the routines and expectations of our normal lives, there is zero recognition of this profoundly important dimension of life. Instead, we prescribe pills, we “get motivated” and become ”successful, we optimize and overschedule. And we get more and anxious.

For all our smartphones and AI, we are a fundamentally stupid culture. Finding your soul is not rocket science.

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