THE ENEMY IS...? When we are laid low with anxiety, depression or overwhelmingly painful feelings of any kind, we often tend to wonder where all this ‘apparently pointless’ suffering comes from. Although it is probably true that we only want to know where the bad feelings come from so that we can escape from them, it is still a very good question. One way to approach this fundamental question is to say that suffering comes from having habits. This isn’t obvious at all because everyone has habits (i.e. predictable patterns of thinking and behaving) but not everyone is afflicted with anxiety, depression, and general feelings of alienation, isolation and desolation. The thing is however that habitual patterns of living do not tend to cause this type of ‘acute’ pain when we are able to carry them out as we have always done, but they will unfailingly cause acute pain when for some reason we are no longer able to enact them as usual. A habit, we may say, causes a crippling sense of desolation in our minds when there is no way to do what the habit wants us to do. Basically, we are going ‘cold-turkey’ – we are withdrawing from whatever comfort-zone it was that we were addicted to. We can illustrate this principle by using a simple example. Let us say that I am a bachelor and I rather set in my ways (as well I might, since there is no one to get me to change them!). An important part of my daily pattern is to goes every afternoon for my lunch in a particular café. This routine suits me well – I like the food that they serve there, I know the people who go there, I look forward to having a pleasant chat with the staff who work there, and so on. Because this suits me so well I see no reason to change, and as the years go by (as they generally do) I become more and more used to this habit. This state of affairs cannot continue forever however – it might seem like it can, but that is of course an illusion. In this story, what happens is that the proprietor of the café sells up and takes early retirement; the place is bought by a firm of property developers who promptly knock it down to make room for a multi-story car park. Now when this happens I will of course experience desolation – I will miss my established pattern and there is nothing that can take its place. It is as if that habit was part of me, and now that it is gone I am left incomplete - there is a big hole in my life that I can do nothing about (other than complain about it, which I do). But although I may – and probably will - lay the blame for my unhappiness elsewhere, the cause of my pain is myself because it was me that allowed the habit to grow. I was the one who fed it; I was the one who carelessly allowed it to become all-powerful. The ‘fault’ is not the loss of the structure that I depended on (or whatever caused that loss) - that is only the external cause - the real cause is me because I was the one who facilitated and nurtured the habit over the years. I lovingly tended and maintained this habit, despite the fact that it was actually my enemy, as becomes all too clear later on. The example we have used here is very oversimplified, and there is at least one way in which it doesn’t seem to hold good. We might object that when a person suffers from anxiety or depression, very often their ‘pattern of living’ is still very much in place, but the pain and misery of anxiety and depression come just the same. We have to make our theory a little bit more sophisticated to account for this, and say that what has happened here is that the power of the habit (or pattern) to give us comfort or security has vanished, leaving us high and dry. I still do the same old stuff that I always did, but it either doesn’t mean anything to me (which is depression) or it doesn’t help me to feel safe or secure (which is anxiety). I am left comfortless, so to speak – I am left in a place where there is no psychological comfort at all. I might of course demand to know why my comfort zones have failed me so cruelly, when everyone else still seems to be doing just fine with theirs, but this is just me complaining. It is my dependence on a habitual (or safe) pattern of living that was the ultimate cause of my pain, whichever way I look at it, and what this means is that it is all really down to me what happens from now on. It always was ‘down to me’ but now I can see it. Once I have a good understanding of what the true cause of my pain is, then this helps me enormously – if I don’t want the pain of going cold turkey (or of being failed by the comfort zone which I have become addicted to) then I simply don’t allow myself to become dependent again… The example of the bachelor who is set in his ways is very easy to understand, but what is harder to grasp is the idea that most of what we fondly call ‘our lives’ is no more than a big, complicated bundle of habits and ‘tendencies-to-react’, trundling along on its predetermined track like a heavy goods train. There are the ‘habits-of-perception’, the ‘habits-of-thinking’, and the ‘habits-of-behaving’, and taken altogether (as a big bundle or package) they constitute that particular and specific circus show that I call ‘my life’. Just as in the example of the bachelor who loved to eat in the same café every day, this bundle of habits is my enemy, and yet just like the bachelor I spend all my time lovingly protecting and maintaining it. Despite the fact that the thing that I am nurturing is only going to bring me untold misery, I use most of my available energy on the task of facilitating its growth. This is like a hard-working starling who devotes herself to feeding a baby cuckoo which has already thrown her own off-spring out of the nest to die. This is a very peculiar if not to say perverse state of affairs. How, we might ask, does the ‘bundle of habits’ manage to be so good at getting us to lovingly protect it? The answer is that it has a very clever trick up its sleeve – it tricks us with the notion of ‘self’. In a nutshell, what it does is to trick us into thinking that it is our ‘self’. It tricks us into identifying with it. I think that the pattern of living that I habitually engage it is actually me, that it is actually ‘who I am’. This is obviously a very effective ruse altogether – after all, what would I not do for my ‘self’? If my ‘self’ is in jeopardy, then I am more than willing to go to any extreme to safeguard it. If the truth were told, I am ready to sacrifice any values or principles that I might claim to have, just so long as my precious ‘self’ can go on existing in the way to which it has become accustomed. But of course the terrible irony in all this is that the ‘pattern of living’ which I am automatically protecting is not who I am at all really. Quite the opposite is true - the pattern that I am protecting and feeding on a daily basis is in actual fact my deadliest enemy.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:23:20 +0000
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