A couple of days ago I experienced a serious bout of Existential Angst.
Woke up feeling rather inadequate and unfulfilled. The big questions about the meaning of life and it’s purpose kept coming into my head.
This was rather interesting as usually I am the one doling out ‘Gyan’ (advice) on these very questions, but when I came face to face with my own fallibility and a lack of real direction or meaning to my life, I had a massive case of existential anxiety.
The moments turned into hours and by the end of the day I had pretty much exhausted myself in trying to figure out the meaning of my life and purpose, but with no avail.
Called up a few friends and that is when the penny dropped. We are all struggling with our own fears and aspirations and always fall short in our own eyes. There is always something we could have, should have done. There is always someone we could have, should have, loved, appreciated or forgiven, etc. there is always that trip I should have taken or that job I should have accepted.
There are so many should’s that the weight becomes so heavy and we break under pressure.
Almost all of us have our moments of crisis. Being a happiness coach did not make me immune to my own crisis. I sat on my bed struggling to answer the questions but the answers never popped up.
Unlike fear, which is a psychological response to a specific threat, anxiety has no discernible cause and it starts to pervade our whole being. This is way more insidious than fear as it originates in our own mind and usually has no external trigger. Unfortunately we can’t fight or runaway from our mind, for the more we fight the more the mind retaliates and takes us into a tailspin.
I twisted and turned trying to think of ways of getting out of my self flagellation mode, but my mind continued to work against me.
Then I remembered my Vedanta teachings. The only way to control the mind is to use the breath. Usually we breathe without thinking and our breath reflects the state of our mind. An unsettled mind is reflected by shallow short breaths.
In order to calm the mind I needed to take long deep breaths. It sounds easy but an unsettled mind tries to put barriers to even this simple act. Somehow I forced myself. I started off with alternate nostril breathing and followed that with long deep breaths. I had learnt that when our outgoing breath is longer than our incoming breath our nervous system is stimulated into a state of relaxation. As I continued to do long rythemic breathing my mind started to calm down but the unanswered questions remained.
Next I turned on really loud Bollywood music and pretended to be ‘Chikni Chameli’. I shut the bedroom door and danced as if no one was watching — luckily no one was 🙂
Combination of physical movement and breath control did seem to have a calming effect on the brain and mind.
Once I was less agitated I could think of what really was troubling me. Luckily I figured it out 🙂 mine was a simple case of PMS, but what if I hadn’t been able to give my condition an name?
What if I really was going through an existential crisis?
I have met many who go through the dark night of the soul trying to figure out the meaning of their life and it’s purpose. Some try to find that meaning in work, some in relationships, some keep themselves so busy that they try and drown that feeling and some just use alcohol and other stimulants to numb themselves from these questions.
We are afraid of our own selves. We are afraid to acknowledge that maybe there is no purpose. Maybe living in joy and authenticity is the very purpose of life? Could it really be that simple? We humans don’t like simple. We like it complicated. Complexity sounds sexy, simplicity sounds boring.
According to Mark Twain “The two most important days are the day you are born and the day you find out why ?”
I disagree.
Each day that we are alive is the most important day. We turn ourselves in knots trying to figure out the why but we forget the how.
I think how we live is more important than why we live?
We can choose to live in regret or we can choose to live in joy. Our mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. When we evaluate our life, it invariably falls short in comparison to others. There is always someone better than us, someone smarter than us, someone richer, prettier, more talented and so on, that’s when feelings of inadequacy, discontentment and doubt seep in.
Living without fear and free from your inner critic is way more fulfilling than trying to figure out the meaning of life. Next time you feel anxious about your life or its purpose remember that the chance of you being on this planet in your body is 400 trillion in one ( I read that somewhere or heard it on a Ted talk).
So the odds are, that your very birth has fulfilled some grand purpose.
Our job is to learn to live in joy and happiness.
A happier and a fulfilled you will do more good for the world than a unhappy, unfulfilled you trying to figure out your purpose.