Just went through Jana’s prescribed exercise. Turned the tunes on loud and focused my energies on cleaning E’s room, all the time moving, moving, moving, and trying to think about my fears and anxieties and how to resolve each of them. Jump, Jive and Wail came on, and I stopped cleaning and just danced, moving my body randomly while focusing on my fears. I had already covered fear of pain of loved ones, fear of my own pain, fear of loss of loved ones, fear of death, and others. In the middle of this wild dance, I hit upon the fear of losing my Self, my Ego. This brought me down to the floor as I curled up in a fetal position, crying dry tears. I lay there, wracked and shocked by my discovery.

I believe that this fear underlies almost all of my others, even the fear of dropping (at least temporarily) the pursuit of grad school. It is a fear that runs deep and affects so many things–perhaps it is the fear of the loss of my soul. For a few moments, I let myself go with the realization that there is no self, no ego–there is only the Void, the Nothingness. We can strive to fill this Void, to give it meaning and substance, but all of this is merely a subset of the Void (but if filled, does it cease to be the Void? Regardless, the reality of the Void is there, and things tend towards entropy and diffusion). I embraced this ultimate reality and opened myself up to it for a few moments. Is god also fighting, filling the void with his creation? Or is the void the same as Buddhist Nirvana, a nothingness of peace and bliss?

I slowly came to, pulling warm socks over my cold feet, embracing myself, striving to fill myself with love and to ponder what the objects I brought in were trying to tell me. I’m still wondering. Anyhow, reality can be scary and bleak. Hide as we might, the seeming random callousness of the universe intrudes in some way, shattering our expectations for ourselves, our loved ones, our world. The only thing to do the end is to embrace it wholly. I am reminded of Jesus praying in the garden, preparing to face a horrible death and the worse torture of the sins and pains of the world–a horrible, unfair burden for one man alone to bear. He wants to reject the bitter cup, but in the end says, “not my will but thine be done.”

I wonder more and more if the tinnitus, the night sweats, the breathing problems, the insomnia, the lack of appetite that I’ve been experiencing for the past few weeks are all anxiety-related: in the past month I’ve faced my own mortality, the heart attack death of an old Church friend of the same age, the horrors and insecurity of the tsunami, etc. I need to face my fears, embrace them, resolve to do only what I can and nothing more, and say to the Universe, “not my will but thine be done.” Then, and only then, can I move past all of this.

I have hope::