There's no one

 To say it's okay. 

I mean, I should be able to tell myself that, right?  I should be able to calm myself down with rational thought, right? But rational thought is in short supply, and what makes it worse is that I'm scared shitless about what that means. So, what actually is there for me to be freaked out about?

Really, nothing. I've got a beautiful and wonderfly batty wife and a decent place to live and enough money to live on if I don't go overboard and I'm relatively healthy, physically, at least. There's no war here. No batshit crazy people shooting up schools and churches and birthday parties. 

I'm reasonably well-educated, BFA and have always been creative, but never in a lucrative way. 

I'm retired and have a plethora of creative outlets. Writing, Music, Photography, and for the first time; plenty of time to pursue them.

So really, what is there to be anxious about? To be scared of? Nothing! Life is good!

Always had this same problem though. 

This anxiety, it's deep. I've always been very comfortable just hanging with myself. Always found it kinda difficult dealing with people, after a certain amount of time. I get tired of their ideosynchracies, and they probly get tired of mine, I know I have buckets of them to dump on people. 

I'm even getting anxious writing this. Like there should be something better I could be doing, if I could only think of what.

When I was younger I got this paralysis, too. It was like a cycle, I'd be up and feeling great and confident and like I could do anything, and I'd start making plans, appointments, line up gigs. But that high point would last maybe a week and then I'd start to crash, the anxiety would kick in and by the time whatever gigs I'd lined up, arraingments I'd made rolled around I'd be deep in panic mode. Eventually I just stopped making plans and lining up gigs. I used the high times for making stuff, because then I could be really productive. But then of course I wouldn't do much with it, becaues I'd lost the confidence.

This was cyclic, Seasonal. Still is.

But now it seems more nuanced, more complex, like it's multiplied or divided into 4 or 5 or 7 separate anxieties that each have a specific cycle to run, a pattern, and they each have their own pattern, their own rhythm which means sometimes they alternate and sometimes they gang up on me. and all of their rhythms are getting faster so that they coincide more often. 

I've read somewhere about stress hormones, and what regulates them, and if what regulates 'em goes haywire then, yeah these stress hormones they just flood your system, man, like a river flowing through the middle of town, everything becomes chaos, cars floating down the street, stores full of valuable merchandise just mashed together, none of it salvagable. 

Or maybe a flood AND a tornado. Throw in an earthquake for good measure.

And here's the thing; I can push it back, put up the next wall, and I'll be fine until I let my guard down, because that wall is crumbling, and I'll have to put up another. In front of it. And I'm running out of room. Running out of time. 

Time and Space

Been reading about that lately. Maybe I shouldn't have. Quantum Physics? The Nature Of Time? Sometimes I have a hard time keeping those abstract ideas abstract. Sometimes it seems those quantum laws are affecting the solid world, the material world. Well, why wouldn't they? Everything is made of this stuff. This thing that is not a thing, but more of an idea. More a thought. 

A word.

I do prayercersize every morning. It's a combination of spiritual practices (which could easily be called prayer) and seated exercizes, mostly in the form of stretching and popping joints. There's a lot of internal grinding and popping, (that I find strangely satisfying) and as in most prayer and exercise, it is fairly repetative, which allows for a certain amount of mind wandering. Free association runs rampant, and often into the sublime. Lately it's been about the nature of the Universe.

See, if we want to understand why humans are human, we need to understand the nature of the universe within which we exist, and acknowledge that humans are designed to be random.

Here it is. The Big Bang, right? Scientists are pretty sure that's where and when the universe was created. Out of nothing. In the Big Bang, the rules and parameters of the physical universe were put into place. The raw materials, and the rules of physics, including quantum physics, perhaps even led by the rules of quantum physics were popped into physical existance with no guiding hand. It's like a computer projection or simulation. You give it a bunch of parameters and a bunch of rules and let it run out and see what happens.

The rules and materials provided were designed to interact randomly, in every possible combination that could be had using these rules and these materials. We had energy and matter and look what happened. Is still happening, and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe.

So a random combination of these materials and rules created opportunities for interaction and combination with other random combinations over a time frame unimaginable (and in many ways arbitrary) but estimated somehow by scientists as 13.787±0.020 billion years and eventually all those random combinations produced life and then us. 

But the random combinations are still going on. Every human being is a random combination of the DNA of their parents, which is a random combination of their parents' DNA which is etc etc etc. 

Some are so random they don't even survive until birth. Each human beng is unique, and randomly derived, no matter how much 'fate brought us together' BS the movies like to show us. Love is also random, and if you haven't seen the most unlikely couples then you haven't been looking. This randomness brings us the truly unique, beautiful and transcendant, as well as the truly horrible, stupid and mean. 

This is what the universe was designed to do.  How do I know it was designed? That's what quantum physicists say. There's every appearance of intelligence in the design of this system, this random combination projection program we call the universe.