PART VIII: Existential Space; Chapter 31: Embracing Tremors
Your choice to avoid anxiety at all costs or to embrace the anxiety that comes with living authentically determines how you will live your life (198) ....Meaning-making requires that you make one mindful choice after another. There is no intellectual freedom, no personal freedom, no human freedom without a commitment to lifelong choosing (199) .... It is much better, although more nerve-wracking, to accept that meaning will never be settled, that meaning is always at risk, and that meaning is a challenge and not a foregone conclusion. (200)
Well, shit.
I'm one of those people who dislikes the anxiety of choice and change. I kick and scream the moment I get even a whiff of either in the offing.
My early experience with change -- and I'm talking wee childhood stuff here -- was generally negative. With every change, things got worse, not better. Soon I preferred no change -- the status quo -- even if the status quo was painful. At least it was pain I knew.
But whether one chooses change or the status quo, it's a choice. Every day that one lives, one chooses -- even by Not Choosing.
So even as an anxious, choice-phobic person, I have gotten to the point in my life where I prefer that my choices be mindful rather than made by default.
Even choices that seem like little ones. For example, rather than let a day go by intending to write but just not getting around to it, I'll generally try harder now to let a non-writing day be intentional. For whatever reason. "I've chosen not to write today." It is what it is.
If it's not a choice you're happy with, learn from it and choose differently the next time. If it turns out to be a productive choice, good job. You're learning to trust yourself.
I doubt I'll ever learn to embrace anxiety and change. But I have learned that neither is my mortal enemy.
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