Anxiety
What If . . . Every Moment You Experienced Today, You Had to Do Over Again?
Dateline: Dallas, Texas, 9 p.m.
I’m standing in front of the yummy shrimp display at Eatzi’s gourmet take-takeout, my over-educated and under-used brain caught in a dilemma. Should I sacrifice and buy only four shrimp or treat myself and buy five? (I know this is a tiny dilemma, big most patterns are pretty simple to describe and hard to change.)
You may recognize the shrimp story, I’ve used it before. Moments of living ‘in the now’ aren’t that easy to notice. At least they aren’t for me. Most of the time I am too caught up in regretting the past or anxiously anticipating the future to notice ‘the now.’
The right now. Are you smiling? What if, right now, you took in a long, slow breath and topped it off with a smile? Really. Try it. Maybe you can’t take charge of anything else in this world, but you can take charge of your face. If you can work up even a tiny twitch, you’ve caught the now. You’ve changed your heart. A little.
Back to the deli counter. Before you judge me, you should know I’m not fixated over just any old shrimp. These are the plumpest, coldest, tastiest cocktail shrimp you can imagine–the sort of shrimp James Bond or maybe the Queen of England has on a regular basis.
We’re talking forty dollars a pound which translates to six dollars a shrimp. That’s three bucks a bite. I go glassy-eyed, caught between desire and restraint.
Restraint: “Six dollars is a lot of money for a shrimp, even a giant one. You spend too much money on the road. What’s the point of working on the road if you’re going to spend the extra dough on shrimp? Look around you, DeShong. You are not an up-towner like these regulars. So, suck it up and get four. People all over the world would love to have four of these shrimp.
Desire: But wait! It’s tiring to be on the road. You deserve a treat. Maybe gulping down five of those luscious shrimp would actually be good for you. Maybe you can start on that all protein diet for the hundred and forth time. On that program you can have all the shrimp you want. Doesn’t make them less expensive but easier to rationalize . . . “
It is during this great use of my ‘now on earth’ that I remember something from the lecture I’d just attended at the Art Museum. Dr. David Eagleman, Head of the Neuroscience Lab at Baylor Medicine, had presented on his book Sum, Forty Tales of the Afterlife. http://eaglemanlab.net/. Sum is a collection of forty possibilities for the afterlife, without a particular religious or ethical point of view. The book isn’t about what he or anyone else believes the afterlife to be. Eagleman’s goal was to get the reader thinking about how he or she is living.
Which is the point of MysteryShrink, too. So, what was I doing tied in a knot (in a pickle) cowed by chilled shrimp?
As I struggled with the shrimp decision, I recalled one of Dr. Eagleman’s frightening little “what if” stories? In this scenario, after you die, you wake up and have to live every minute of your life over again.
With a catch. In the Sum afterlife, instead of experiencing events and activities in a sequential order—wake up, get out of bed, get a headache, take some aspirin, spill coffee, stub toe, traffic jam, encounter jackass on freeway, fall in love, get married, have a baby, worry for thirty minutes a day about your child, go on a diet, encounter jackass at work, think about going off your diet, take out the trash— In the Sum afterlife, you are required to relive your life in chunks determined by activity.
Thus . . . you must stub your toe for a couple of hours, spend a year straight jammed up on the freeway, suffer through two years of buying diet books, two years worrying, a decade complaining, live all love experiences in a stream, and take out the trash over and over and over.
You get the idea. Since when I patronize Eatzi’s I always start out telling myself I’ll buy something cheaper than the shrimp, in Eagleman’s afterlife, I’d have to spend four days circling the counters trying to talk myself into a sandwich.
The shrimp decision was easy in the new context. No way did I want to spend six weeks in the afterlife standing in front of Eatzi’s seafood counter in deciding whether to buy four or five shrimp.
Check his idea out. Take a couple of hours, starting say, NOW, and live your life AS IF Eagleton’s possibility is what really happens.
Ask yourself: “If it was true that I’d have to live this very moment over again—would I clean up my act?”
Would I accept more responsibility for my thoughts and actions?
“Would I choose to worry about things and outcomes I cannot control?”
