PS...I was the grocery early this morn and was talking to a checker there. She mentioned Jean Paul Sartre and that started it all about what I call this "existential" depression/terror thing. She understood and gave me, in hindsight what I now see as very good advice..."Don't think too much."
Maybe this was Tolstoy's problem, too. He found that the poor and working class were more happy and hopeful than he. Perhaps that's because they had to focus every minute of every day on getting food to eat...doesn't give much time to think on these terrifying existential thoughts.
Something I also do is to try, try, to keep focus on the fact that we have an animal brain and animal senses, an animal brain trying to understand life in this most profound universe. We animals in pants aren't even near the periphery of understanding. By keeping my focus there, I don't get stuck on what the limited human eyes can see...that there is no doubt much more than we know. Even life after death, that there is no complete nothingness of us, of the people we love, of humanity in general, when the physical dies. I keep the focus on...anything is possible in this universe composed of multiple universes. So, no longer practicing Catholicism, I still look up and then within.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AnnaBettina
I didn't welcome you...I didn't reach my hand out, so to speak, across the wide internet and offer it to you. Inexcusable. Especially after you said how frightened you are. Guess I was focused on my own terror...we humans do have a tendency to focus on self...largely why there is so much terror in the world. And terror this is...even the Terror Management Theory.
I can't offer you anything, but perhaps this is very big, that I understand how you sometimes feel that this is a horror movie. I tend to think it is, oh some good things scattering the bad, but largely a horror movie...Super Bowls and yet unspeakable things being done to the guy down the street, in the next country, wherever, and yet we holler and have a "good time" at young guys knocking each other in the head enough in some cases to cause brain damage that doesn't show up until later in life. Human beings...no one is wrapped too tight...guess on some level, even when so repressed, most are freaked out.
So I offer my hand as someone who gets it. And maybe in the process we'll learn how to live a good life in the midst all this madness. Ideally, we'll learn without some drug the animal in pants guy/girl has made in a lab and doesn't know exactly how that drug affects the brain. If not, we'll try to find the meds which can help us to be inured to this wild sci fi movie we're living. Whatever the case, we'll find a way...to paraphrase, hope springs eternal in the heart of the menopausal woman (who once wasa secular nun and here I am with my life paradigms no longer cutting the mustard, so to speak...very hard, an understatement).
A warm hand to you across the Internet, Anna.
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