Our one and solely daughter has gone off to school. My spouse and I dropped her off the weekend earlier than. As we made the four-hour drive from Houston to Baton Rouge alongside I-10, the street stretched forward, each infinite and fleeting, as if time itself had been torn between holding on and letting go. Between bursts of laughter and quiet silences, we spoke of courses, friendships, boys, the self-discipline of focus, and, most significantly, the questions that form a life, particularly: the “whys” she should always remember. Each phrase, each pause, was stuffed with the sort of love mother and father hope will echo in a baby’s coronary heart lengthy after they’re gone. We tried to cover the ache of understanding she was not fully ours.
Although it’s barely two weeks since she left, my spouse is already unraveling. She worries about the whole lot beneath the solar; what Nkechi eats, whether or not she is secure, if she is actually completely happy. She insists she ought to by no means take an Uber alone, solely with pals, as a result of the world may be unkind, and moms, as if by intuition, at all times think about the worst.
I wish to assume I’m dealing with it just a little higher, however that’s solely half true. My worries are quieter, maybe, however they linger all the identical. And the irony isn’t misplaced on me: the truth that she has at all times been such a very good child, accountable, grounded, by no means giving us motive to lose sleep, has achieved little to ease the burden of our creativeness operating wild. The human thoughts, I’ve discovered, is endlessly artistic in fabricating disasters the place none exist.
As people, it’s putting how we conjure total catastrophic situations out of uncertainty. An electronic mail from the boss with the topic line “See me” appears like a summons to doom. A delayed name from a partner morphs into betrayal. A gentle headache turns into the seed of a mind tumor in our creativeness. And so, lengthy earlier than something actual has occurred, now we have already lived via the struggling.
Seneca, the stoic thinker of Historical Rome, captured this human folly nearly two millennia in the past when he noticed: “We endure extra typically in creativeness than in actuality.” Ache in actuality is bounded, finite, and tangible. Worry in creativeness is infinite, cruel, and with out borders. Michel de Montaigne, centuries later, echoed the identical reality: “My life has been stuffed with horrible misfortunes, most of which by no means occurred.”
As an intensivist working with the very sick, I can testify that Seneca’s knowledge performs out each day on the bedside. It isn’t at all times the sickness itself that consumes the sick, however the anticipation of it. I’ve seen sufferers scheduled for surgical procedure laid low with the evening earlier than, unable to sleep, gripped by the concern that they might not make it via. But as soon as the operation is finished, and the tubes and machines are withdrawn, many uncover that the struggling of anticipation was far worse than the ordeal itself.
Households, too, stay via this cycle: they endure the lack of family members many occasions of their creativeness earlier than the precise second arrives. And when it does, when actuality lastly calls for its share, they typically discover that it’s bearable, even infused with moments of grace, solidarity, and sudden braveness.
One in every of my most necessary duties as a health care provider, past prescribing medicines and adjusting ventilators, helps sufferers and households disentangle actual affected by imagined struggling. To remind them, generally gently and generally firmly, that they needn’t die a thousand deaths of their minds earlier than actuality arrives.
Historical past presents additional affirmation of this reality. Through the main German bombing marketing campaign in opposition to the UK in World Battle II, popularly referred to as the London Blitz, psychologists noticed that the anticipation of bombings typically created better nervousness than the bombings themselves. As soon as the sirens stopped and the bombs fell, individuals tailored, discovered braveness, and constructed neighborhood amid the rubble. Actuality had boundaries; creativeness had none.
And it isn’t simply in warfare or sickness. In on a regular basis life, we expertise the identical dynamic. What number of duties have we procrastinated on as a result of we imagined they might be insufferable, solely to find, as soon as begun, that they had been manageable, even simple? What number of conversations have we prevented as a result of we pictured them spiraling into battle, solely to seek out, in actuality, that honesty introduced aid?
Time and again, the dread proves worse than the deed.
The issue is even magnified in our digital age. Each headline predicting collapse, each social media feed amplifying catastrophe, each algorithm pushing sensational concern tales retains us in cycles of imagined struggling. We doomscroll our means into panic, prisoners of “what if,” sacrificing the current to a future that will by no means arrive.
The tragedy is that imagined struggling isn’t innocent. Persistent nervousness triggers cascades of stress hormones, elevating blood strain, impairing sleep, weakening immunity. Our our bodies pay curiosity on emotional money owed we don’t owe. We rehearse ache, and in doing so, we hurt ourselves twice: as soon as in anticipation, and as soon as if it comes, in actuality.
None of that is to disclaim the legitimacy of struggling. Sickness, loss, betrayal, and failure are all a part of the human situation. However once they arrive, they arrive clothed within the explicit, not within the boundless infinity of our creativeness. Actuality, regardless of how brutal, typically brings with it stunning items: resilience we by no means knew we had, compassion from others, and the invention of which means even in ache. I’ve seen sufferers going through terminal sickness with dignity, households rallying round family members, communities rising from tragedy with solidarity and braveness. In these moments, actuality turned out far kinder than the creativeness that preceded it. For actuality, in contrast to concern, comes not solely with ache however with the potential for grace.
The query turns into, how can we resist the tyranny of creativeness? We can not silence it altogether, however we are able to refuse to be its prisoner. We will title our fears and write them down, typically discovering their absurdity on paper. We will anchor ourselves within the current, paying consideration to what’s really taking place reasonably than what would possibly occur. We will take a look at our fears in opposition to proof, asking: What do I actually know, and what am I assuming? We will recall the resilience now we have proven prior to now, trusting that we are going to rise once more. And above all, we are able to refuse to endure twice. When hardship comes, it should demand its share, allow us to not pay it upfront.
Seneca’s’ knowledge stays revolutionary as a result of it cuts throughout centuries and cultures. We endure extra in creativeness than in actuality, and actuality, for all its sharp edges, typically proves kinder than we concern. My spouse and I have to study this lesson as we watch our daughter start her journey into the world and navigate life on her personal phrases. We should not stay via our funeral earlier than our demise. Life is already tough; it doesn’t want the added weight of rehearsed tragedies. I simply completed studying a memoir by Femi Otedola, one in every of Nigeria’s wealthiest males, and in it he shared a mirrored image that has stayed with me. Paraphrasing his phrases: There’s a time to be born and a time to die, however in between, we should discover ways to stay. To really stay, requires us to withstand the tyranny of creativeness; the infinite rehearsals of struggling that by no means comes, the fears that rob us of the second we’re standing in. It’s the artwork of inhabiting the current with out dying a thousand little deaths earlier than the ultimate one. For the key of a life effectively lived isn’t in banishing concern altogether, however to endure solely what’s actual.
Osmund Agbo is a pulmonary doctor.
