Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!

hese are terrible days. These are beautiful days. Somehow both realities feel inseparable in our minds now.

We have the sense that something bad might happen, and has already happened. When we read the headlines, we do not shake our heads. We nod. Yes, we think. Of course that would happen.

Our moods seem tight and jittery. We worry about groceries and school shootings and airborne viruses. We worry about kids and parents and friends and whether this, whatever this is, is all we can expect. We worry about the heart-stopping events we have already endured and what will happen next.

We worry about how we will get it all done.

We worry about everything that can never be undone.

“How are you?” people ask us.

“Anxious,” we might reply.

But when the sun begins its nightly descent, instinctively, we cast our eyes to the horizon. We have the sense that something lovely will happen, and has already happened yesterday. We notice how the white glare of the sun behind starched clouds is pooling into oranges and deep reds, and our breath begins to slow. We nod. Yes, we think. This is also what happens.

Our moods thaw into awe. We marvel at good medicine, the invention of cheese dip, and the delightful mischief in our child’s eye no matter how old they are. We marvel at the intricacy of flowers and the ingenuity of cities built from steel and concrete. We cannot believe how much our parents can drive us bananas and our friends can make us laugh so hard that we need to find a wall to support ourselves.

We find ourselves surrounded by the daily miracles of planets turning and stars blinking and people who hug us when we come through the door.

“How are you?” people ask us.

“Grateful,” we might reply.

We might feel awful or wonderful, but we are running out of those middle-of-the-road feelings…the more boring, humdrum feelings of being unfazed by the world around us. We are no longer able to be carried along by the momentum of ordinary days unfolding into other ordinary days. Instead, we are lifted and carried by currents larger than we are, taking us further and faster than we wanted to go. There are highs and lows, soaring views and stomach-clenching drops.

This is the new way of being in the world, the sense of unpredictably and precipitously rising and falling. We are made of feathers. We are made of stone.

What Kind of Anxiety Is This?

Why do we feel fear pricking at the edges of our minds? Why does it feel so normal to be so hypervigilant…so aware?

Well, there are a few varieties of fear that might be useful to name here: apocalyptic awareness, anxious awareness, and awareness of pain. And none of these emotions will be the sort of thing we bring up at parties, but we intuitively understand them to be parts of how we experience worry.

Apocalyptic Awareness

The first, apocalyptic awareness, will not be news to you. We feel afraid because—to name only a few factors—we are witnessing the increasing fragility of the structures that hold up our lives. We are seeing all the signs of our weakening democracy, the eroding environment, racial injustice, public mistrust of civic institutions, the rise of medical bankruptcy, et cetera…I could go on and on. We feel afraid because the headlines break into our days like sledgehammers.

When we start to feel like our world is teetering on the edge of the abyss, we are living with a sense of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic is a wonderful word because it feels the way it sounds: destructive, terrifying, catastrophic. But the word also means “that which is revealed.”

(Side note: Theologically speaking, Christians have a long, rich tradition of thinking and arguing and making predictions about the way God’s creation—the earth and everything else made by divine intent—comes to an end. E.g., Jesus returning to earth, AND SO ON. But I don’t mean apocalyptic in that narrow sense.)

It’s also the feeling we get when we watch a documentary about rising sea levels and experience a chill. We feel like we are staring over the edge of time itself. Something happens in our minds. We pick up the thought and then want to drop it immediately because it is too impossible, too big, and too terrible to imagine. We worry that nothing we do would matter anyway. And yet we know. We see. We can’t pull our eyes away.

Anxious Awareness

Some of us—most of us—would probably say that we know less about downright terror and more about anxiety. We wear it like a second skin. What could happen? Will it happen? We find ourselves guessing and second-guessing choices we have made. We lose more time stopping and checking our impulses than we could possibly describe, only because we would have to stop and check to think about it first. Other people seem to have a kind of natural bravado that propels them through life (which, sorry for my loud judgments here, makes them brave or stupid or wildly efficient). But that’s not us.

Our thoughts have an endlessness to them: What does that person think? What should I do? What did I do wrong? How can I keep myself safe? How can I keep others safe? We don’t know how to protect ourselves from the feeling that we are exposed somehow, open to the elements. We understand vigilance intimately. We would be naked without it.