We don’t need to write piano sonatas, but what we do need is to be immersed in our passions. It can be anything outside of ourselves. A few years ago, I kid you not, I helped pull myself out of a moderate anxiety patch by getting deeply into the first four seasons of Game of Thrones.
Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fall deeply into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words.
Find a passion as large as your fear.
The way out of your mind is via the world.
Joy Harjo and the one whole voice
“Everyone comes into the world with a job to do,” wrote Joy Harjo. “I don’t mean working for a company, a corporation—we were all given gifts to share, even the animals, even the plants, minerals, clouds . . . All beings.”
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the first Indigenous American to become the United States poet laureate. Her poems are beautiful, and draw on her heritage and the depths of the human subconscious. She is an activist, but her activism isn’t confined to one area. She has spoken about the rights of Indigenous Americans, feminism and climate change, and feels these are all interconnected. Indeed, that is a theme of her work. The holistic nature of things. “To pray you open your whole self / To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon / To one whole voice that is you.”
Harjo embodies this in other ways too. When she performs she fuses prose and poetry and music as if they are all the same thing. She wrote a piece called “Ahhhh Saxophone” and with that instrument, she says, “all that love we humans carry makes a sweet deep sound and we fly a little.”
She has won awards for her music as well as her poetry. The interesting thing is that she was in her forties before she learned to play the saxophone. Well, it’s interesting—and comforting—to me because it tells me it is really never too late to begin something valuable.
I abandoned the piano at the age of thirteen. Up until then my parents had been paying for me to attend weekly piano lessons with a piano teacher, Mrs. Peters. But then I became the adolescent who didn’t want to tell his friends he couldn’t see them on Friday evening because he was having piano lessons. Other interests took over my young mind, and learning Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Mozart’s “Gavotte” seemed suddenly an irrelevant chore.
Many times over the years I have regretted that decision, wondering what it would have been like if I had kept going. And yet, for all that wondering, I never actively did anything about it until this year, at the age of forty-five, when I began to relearn the piano with my kids during lockdown. Of course, it is humiliating trying to learn anything side-by-side with an eleven- and twelve-year-old. It is like trying to learn to swim beside a sailfish. But it was great to make progress, to actually play, and to realize that there is no cut-off age for development.
Joy Harjo is not the only musical late starter, of course. Leonard Cohen famously didn’t begin his musical career until deep in his thirties. Though gifted musically from a young age, Verdi wrote most of his best stuff after the age of fifty, including his opera of Otello that he finished aged seventy-three.
I will never be as musically competent as Verdi, or Joy Harjo, or even, as it turns out, a fast-learning twelve-year-old, but I have access to the ability to play music, and enjoy playing music, and that is enough. The joy of music is in the music. The playing of it. The listening to it. And it is a joy with a wide-open door, welcoming all.
That’s all we can do, right? Keep as many doors open as possible. Keep embracing the whole of ourselves. Keep failing. As Harjo herself says, “There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”
Protection
Once upon a time I felt pressure not to let people down. I stayed doing work I hated. Went to parties I didn’t really want to be at. Saw people I found agonizingly hard to converse with. Faked every smile.
And then my mind exploded.
After which I realized it is better to let people down than to blow yourself up.
Quantum freedom
According to quantum physics, the laws of the universe are probabilistic. This means that even among the smallest particles, nothing is entirely predictable. There is always uncertainty and things that can’t be entirely predicted and measured. Determinism fails in the face of quantum reality. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who came up with the uncertainty principle—or rather, the Uncertainty Principle—discovered that even if every single initial condition is known, it is still impossible to predict with any fixed certainty the behavior of waves and particles. Likewise, chaos theory explains how even things on a bigger scale, like weather, are not entirely predictable and can’t ever be. (How many times have we been surprised by a day of sunshine when we were told to expect showers?) Similarly, neuroscientists have shown us that the very structure of our brain, and the nerve cells within it, also acts with elements of randomness.
In other words, a key defining feature of the universe, of nature, of our environment, of us, is uncertainty. There is always a space for chance. As something begins to change or move, it changes with a degree of the unknown, whether it is light through a slit in a barrier or a hurricane or a brain cell. The universe is, essentially, an ever-evolving possibility. While fear might want us to imagine the worst is certain, the future—like everything else—remains uncertain, unpredictable, open, free. And even the very smallest event in the maze that is our lives can result in the most unexpected outcome.
Other people are other people
Let’s state the obvious, because the obvious is easy to take for granted and forget. You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you. Yes, of course we can often learn from each other, and sometimes people learn from you. And that’s great, even if it is rarer than we like to admit. As Ayishat Akanbi put it, “If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.” You don’t punish anyone other than yourself by keeping hate inside you. Other people are other people. You are you.
Wrong direction
Your self-worth is not found inside the minds of other people.
Applied energy
History can be a comfort. It helps us understand our place in time, and to appreciate what humans have done and lived through in the past for us to end up here.
Discovering the human stories of the past, in particular, can give us a kind of strength. Knowing what human beings achieved, what they survived, and that some of them managed to make the world better for us to live in today.