Imagine taking a caveman and plucking him from his cave and dropping him right in the middle of the Edinburg festival, say at the closing concert. Stick him in front of the bandstand while the Scottish Chamber Orchestra pounds out the tunes and then fill his vision with cascading and shooting fireworks as they fill the skies around the castle and tumble down the walls and bank. Can you imagine the terror, wonder and displaced feelings? I can. I lost my mum in the city centre when I was 4 and I remember looking up at the faces in a panic trying to find hers and thinking how big everyone was. One woman who realised I was lost, thankfully stopped and took charge of finding mum. She kept saying “she won’t be far away darling” and to be fair she wasn’t. I didn’t leave her side for a good couple of days after that.
The outer shell of our humanness has evolved and physically we do not resemble our ancestors. The issue is that the core nervous, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are all working on the old operating system. It is a Rolls Royce body with a lawnmower engine. It’s a caveman at the Edinburgh festival. Anxiety and worry will always be part of the makeup, and we have to acknowledge them when they show up and walk in peace with them until they pass.
When Phil and I were in our twenties we were throwing a party for our 5th wedding anniversary. We were getting our home and food prepared for the party and we weren’t communicating very well. We were both under stress and before long were both snapping at each other, and spending time stewing over the crossed words. We both felt aggrieved and were mulling it over in our minds. We only spoke to bark instructions at each other and every exchange fanned the flames of our frustration. This crazy circus of thoughts made the stress of preparing everything even worse, and both of us were unsettled and frustrated as the doorbell rang and our friends began to arrive. The thing is though we just snapped out of it, we stopped following each other down the rabbit warrens of aggrieved thinking and we pulled together to host the party. We shared an objective that was bigger and more important than either of our individual agendas and so cooperating meant that we just stopped stewing on things. The whole situation just mended itself without our help, we didn’t need a post-mortem to find peace, we just needed to get out of the way and let the natural balance come back? Nowadays it’s only building flat pack furniture that has the potential to have one or the other of us in a huff, so we get our goddaughter to do it for us. Life is too short for Ikea rows.
I think that there is a tendency to try and ward off feelings and to think a lot about how not to think a lot. If you try to squash or banish a feeling then you are just squeezing a balloon, it’s going to pop out somewhere else. Feelings of anxiousness, annoyance, worry etc will always have to rise but they will leave as quickly as they come if we leave them alone. You are going to have to evolve yourself from the inside out.
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