Laughing in the Face of Death

For the past several months I’ve been feeling a pervasive, low-level anxiousness. It’s a byproduct of learning to be more vulnerable, removing my emotional armor piece by piece, so it’s simply there. And by dint of living with it continually, I got to explore it.

One of the nice things about knowing that I created this anxiety myself is that I also know that this anxiety is artificially induced. There’s no external circumstances threatening me, beyond feeling more of everyone else’s pain. This gives me the freedom to sit with it, to feel it without reacting to it.

In that place, I discovered that anxiousness, and terror in general, has two components, like different notes in a chord.

The low note is resistance, the desire to keep it together, to not feel. It’s compressive, unsteady, like boulders grinding against each other as they settle.

But the high note in terror is a clean, steady note, as if from a flute. It has a flow to it, like water sliding clearly and smoothly over a rock in a stream.

As I was feeling these notes, I asked myself, “What if it were okay to feel that high note? What if I decided the high note were a good feeling, not a bad one?”

As I focused on that mindset, on embracing that high note, my mind was blown wide open. I found myself loving everything, seeing aching beauty in highway construction sites, looking tenderly upon my fellow drivers stuck in traffic, sobbing in joy.

Our minds are terrified by that high note. It is closed off from us as children, as we are told not to express our emotions, as we are teased by others in school or taught to be bullies. Most of us haven’t lived in that high note since before we became self-aware.

People hurt us for living in that high note. And we learned to avoid it, on fear of pain or abandonment.

There’s a phenomenon where, when people are striving to their utmost, pitting themselves against the elements, when they are closest to death and putting everything on the line to defy it, something breaks open inside, and they suddenly have never felt more alive. Everything becomes so clear, so vibrant, so brilliant. Life is truly lived in that moment closest to death, when even internal resistance is sacrificed to staying alive in that moment.

And they laugh.

They have never felt anything like it. The fear melts away, and they are taken by the brilliance of their experience.

They laugh in the face of death.

We don’t have to face death to experience it. We can feel our own everyday fears. Then look for the high note.