Impending doom and cosmic cuddles
Have you been stung by a jellyfish? Or do you just feel that way?
Friends, I am here, your free life coach.
I’m late because I work for myself and I’m the best boss in the world. Don’t believe me? Here’s a recent conversation I had about this very column with my boss:
Me: Time to write the thing.
Me: I’m tired.
Me: OK, get to it when you can.
Don’t you wish you had a boss like me? You can. Come work for me. I pay nothing, but I ask nothing in return. If you’re doing nothing you may already be working for me. Congratulations! And if that construct bothers you, you may quit at any time. I’ll always welcome you back.
Moving on to this week’s Free Life Coach topic: How to deal with dread. (Assuming you haven’t been stung by a jellyfish: see below.)
If you’re like me, you sometimes feel like something bad is going to happen. You sometimes may have a sense of impending doom. Not everyone feels this way. Some lucky people (my wife) generally feel fine. But if you’re reading Free Life Coach then you know what I’m talking about. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be reading some other substack for people who are always fine. Don’t hate them, see last week’s post on envy. Just appreciate them. They make incredible spouses.
Before we get into treating your occasional sense of impending doom, let’s get one thing straight: I need you to know that people feel doom after being stung by a box jellyfish. This is called the Irukandji Syndrome.
If you haven’t been stung by the box jellyfish, then you might have the more common feeling that I often have. The idea that shit’s going sideways, though I can’t always say why, exactly. I just know it. Or feel it. My mother feels it. She said her mother felt it too.
Where does it come from? Here’s my crackpot theory: evolutionary biology. We were naturally selected because the happy folks who skipped through the jungle were mostly eaten, while the neurotic, nervous, hyper-vigilant humans that thought there was a lion behind every bush survived. They were miserable, but they were alive. Evolution doesn’t select for happiness, of that I’m certain.
So what to do about our hard-wired terror, for those of us who lost the genetic lottery? I have a treatment. I have at varying times throughout my life believed and not believed in a higher power. This technique works on both mindsets.
If you believe in a higher power
Look down. Imagine the cracks in the Earth or sidewalk as the lines in the palm of your higher power’s hand. Imagine being held. Picture your time at this moment as one of rest, literally placed in God’s hand. You are being held. You are OK. Believe it.
Soothing, right? But what if religious or spiritual imagery gives you the creeps? No worries!
If you don’t believe in a higher power
Imagine the incredible, appalling, wondrous web of cosmic coincidences that ricocheted off of each other to land you here, in this time, in this place. That overwhelming network of circumstance is a skein of cause, effect, probability, and improbability that somehow tangled itself up into the shape of you. It’s gloriously impossible and a gift of randomness that’s likely to never happen again.
Look down, imagine the cracks in the Earth or sidewalk or floor beneath you as a cradle of coincidence, a hammock of happenstance that is holding you as certainly as it wove itself over millennia into the fact of you being here now.
Relax into the notion that you are being held, if only by the gravity that glues you to the ground. That field that ties our universe together is stronger than any human hug. It’s got you, and it’s never letting go.
I feel it. Do you? I’m no hippy, friends. I’m a fellow traveler on this whirling orb who needs to be held as much as anyone. And whether it’s God or gravity, held I am. And so are you.
Sending you a cosmic cuddle,
I remain,
Your Free Life Coach
True and helpful. Thank you!
What a fantastic way to acknowledge and process that dread feeling, Coach! A cosmic cuddle is most welcome.
Really enjoyed this piece. Thank you!