Watch out for the undertow

This morning someone used the towel which hangs
in the bathroom, the one I claim for myself.  I’m not so much critical of the fact that someone else used
my towel – these things happen – but more the fact that when I went to dry myself,
the cold wet of an already damp towel jarred and left me in ill spirits on an
otherwise perfectly fine morning. 
Or is it a perfectly fine morning? 
Today I have promised one of
daughters that I will help her with an essay on the topic of fear and anxiety.  
We all know fear : that cliff
you’re about to drive over, that near miss on the road, that accidental slip of
the knife.  Fear, actual and
intense that sets off your adrenaline big time and leaves your underarms prickling with
sweat and a racing heart. 
But anxiety is worse.  Anxiety is insidious.  Something out there, sometimes you know
not what, sets your heart racing, your pulse soaring and all you know is that
you feel a deep sense of dread. 
The old fight/flight response to fear kicks in but it doesn’t budge.  It hangs around.  
When I feel anxious there’s nothing clear cut to
fight.  There’s nothing obvious to
flee and so I’m stuck, bathed in these hormones with a vague sense of what
might be troubling me but an inability to shift it because it is not what
might be called real. 
Even now I can feel it.  I try to attach it to something: that
talk I’m to give to a group of post grad students at the end of the week,
rehearsal anxiety, free-floating fear of the unknown, but is that enough? 
I’ve prepared for the talk.  It should be okay.  Is that enough? 
For me sometimes even thinking about
anxiety can make me anxious.  And
anxiety is contagious.  I pick it
up from other people, quick smart, especially from those who are near and dear
to me. 
It’s also the stuff of terrorism, the
ways in which certain people play on our fears to divide and conquer. 
In Thomas Keneally’s novel, Flying
Hero Class, the narrator anticipates the
hijacking of a plane and makes a plea for solidarity among the passengers.
What they will do these hijackers,
he says, is to select a few of us for special treatment – cruel treatment.  Those selected will be chosen for some
fault of their history, culture or some such thing.  They will be isolated and punished.  Basically they will be punished in
order to split up the rest of the group. 
It’s an old technique.  Those not selected will gradually find
themselves withdrawing from these victims.  Gradually those not selected will feel a sense of blame
towards these others, a sense of their badness.  And all of this will emerge out of a sense of not having
been chosen. 
We must avoid the process at all
cost, the narrator argues.  Solidarity will help
us.  Black and white, Jew and
gentile must come together to avoid the divisiveness of the hijackers. 
On the other side there are Helen Garner’s thoughts from The First Stone.
‘I’ve seen hesitant people
bludgeoned by an appeal to solidarity,’ she writes.  ‘Solidarity can be used to mock genuine doubt, to blur a
fatal skid in reasoning.  Run the
flag up the pole and see who salutes. 
Whenever I feel in myself the warm emotional rush of righteousness of
belonging, that accompanies the word solidarity, I try to remember to stop and
wait till the rush subsides so I can have a harder look at what has provoked
it.’
I too can feel the clash of anxiety,
alongside my wish to belong when I press the send button to make a comment on
that controversial blog, No Place for Sheep, where people can be very generous and thoughtful and yet a other times they might brawl on line
about important topics and some actually abuse one another. 
But I am drawn to this anxiety, too, like
a toddler to an open socket.  I’m
drawn to the excitement of it, the kick-in of hormones that can leave me
feeling more alive.  
Without
anxiety life might become too drab and ordinary.   But watch out for the underto, or the ‘under toad’ as the young Walt, a character in John Irving’s novel, The world According to Garp, calls it.  
Anxiety needs to be optimal to inspire and fire you up.  But too much anxiety and you wind up paralysed.  

Longing to belong

The money collectors are out on
street corners in honour of the Good Friday Children’s Hospital appeal.  I try not to resent the rattling of
tins at every intersection I pass through on my way home from the airport.  One of my daughters is off to China
with her boyfriend and we were up at 4.45 am in order to make their flight to
Sydney and from there onto Shanghai. 
Most years I relish the quiet of
Good Friday but this Good Friday has already been anything but quiet.  It’s the middle of the day before I
have a chance to sit down and write. 
Yesterday a free-standing brick
wall on a construction site fell over in Carlton killing two young people and
critically injuring a third.  An
hour or so later a couple of suburbs away in Richmond a truck clipped a car at
a busy intersection, mounted the curb and then struck a fourteen year old
schoolgirl on her way from home. 
She died at the scene. 
Two freak accidents which have left
me waiting for a third and so frightening on Holy Thursday, the Thursday before
Easter,  or so it has been named in
my family on my mother’s side for generations.  Holy Thursday and the last supper. 
I can only think of the families of
those young people who died, through no fault of their own.  A freak accident.  In the wrong place at the wrong time
and try as I might everything else pales into insignificance. 
The people rattling their tins
offer broad and coaxing smiles – 
give give give.  Most are
dressed in uniform, from the fire brigade, to the SES, even school kids.  Collectors with arm bands and bright
coloured tins.  All collect for
charity. 
On the way home from the airport
another daughter and I stopped in Carlton at Baker’s Delight to buy some bread and encountered a family of fire
brigade collecting folk, father, mother and a few children.  They were all dressed in fireman’s
overalls and rattling their tins in the faces of diners at one of the open air
cafes where patrons enjoy their meals on the street footpath. 
I tried hard not to judge.  All in a good cause and people were
polite and agreeable but inside my head I thought the collectors were
intrusive.
It’s not a bad thing I know but
still the part of me that resiles from too much generosity cringes.  Maybe such ‘begging’ has the hall mark
of my overly Catholic childhood where excess generosity hid all sorts of
atrocities. 
It’s sometimes hard to put the good
deeds of the church up against the things that go on behind closed doors – the
abuses, not just of children, but of others who are powerless to protect
themselves. 
I went to an Anglican service on
Wednesday night where one of my daughters sang in the choir.  I went to listen to her singing but the
religious elements were to the fore, 
not that they convinced me. 
I enjoyed the spectacle, the back
and forth chanting across the church hall, the slow extinguishing of six of the
seven candles in the centre of the church until a church helper in black robes
took the last one from the church – 
to symbolise Christ’s death or so it said in the accompanying pamphlet –
and we were left in darkness. 
As I looked around at some of the
people in the church, those whom I imagined had arrived out of conviction
rather than from a wish to hear their children sing, I felt a twinge of
jealousy. 
Oh, to believe.  To have such conviction, and a certain
view the world and our place in it.  I have no such certainty.  As much as a part of me admires them their confidence,
another part of me shudders. 
And there’s a shut out quality for
those who don’t believe. 
I felt this as a child growing up
within the Catholic church.  There
was ‘us’ and there was ‘them’.  And
belonging to the ‘us’ part of the equation offered security.  We were on the right path, the one true
faith. The rest, the poor misguided souls were headed elsewhere. 
We could pity them.  We could have some level of respect for
their mistaken ways but we were on the side of right and might and all was
well. 
My mother’s church from whence some of my sense of certainty first sprang. 
I lost that certainty a long time
ago but these days when  I see
signs of it elsewhere, and not just within religious institutions – it exists
in football clubs, political parties, professional groups – I can feel the same
cringe of exclusion, but this time from the other side, from that of the
outsider. 
The same fear of and longing to
belong.