As I have stated before — part of being human is that we experience anxiety.
As I get close to bringing this 31 day series of sitting with our anxiety to the end, I realize that we have covered a lot, though not all has been covered.
Continue to do the hard work to resist the daily forces that pull you into anxiety and anxious environments and relationships.
Move through your day thinking about its rhythms, and how those rhythms fit into the larger rhythm of your week, your year, and your life. Because our rhythms contribute to the increase or decrease of our anxieties, and how we manage and navigate them.
The acclaimed writer Annie Dillard says it better of course when she writes:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
The Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, in what I believe is one of the best books ever written on anxiety, and more specifically a theology of anxiety (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of NOW) writes the following about the weekly rhythm of Sabbath keeping:
“And those who participate in it break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor. And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter practice does not produce so much; but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human project…
It declares in bodily ways that we will not participate in the anxiety system that pervades our social environment. We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness and by pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relations or anywhere in our lives. Because our life does not consist in commodity.”
How will you begin to organize the rhythm of your days so that you begin to experience freedom from anxiety, and a peace in the midst of it?