When I am asked for one thing I might say to anxious Drew if I could go back in time and talk to him, it would probably be this.
“Listen brother, everything is temporary. You just have to allow it to be.”
This is one of those core recovery principles that spills over into life too. Everything in the universe is transient and temporary. This includes the physical and/or emotional state of any person. It’s a pretty important feature in terms of the overall design of the universe, but we often overlook it and wind up fighting against it when we are struggling in recovery.
In any given moment, for most human beings, how we feel is pretty important. This varies in degree from person to person. Some of us place tremendous importance on what we feel and what we think all the time. Others not so much. But I think we’d be hard pressed to find a human that remains oblivious at all times to their own emotional, mental and physical state. For anxious people - people who are afraid and uncomfortable - this habit becomes really ingrained. Treating how we feel as the most important thing in the room becomes the default state. This poses a problem because we stop accepting and allowing the natural progression of things. We dig our heels into one moment in time and try with all our might to fix that moment.
That’s never going to work. Not ever. And really, it doesn’t have to work. The Universe already has us covered. We’re just too stubborn to accept the solution it offers because it’s a difficult solution.
Let’s take an imagination trip to illustrate this.
Imagine you are eating lunch. Today’s lunch is a classic. Peanut butter and jelly. Who doesn’t love a good PB&J, right? You’re cruising along through your sandwich when suddenly you’re tasting and feeling something in your mouth that you know should not be there. Now think about the process of chewing as the passage of time. You are chewing - time is passing - then something odd, unusual, and likely uncomfortable or frightening happens. What the hell is in this sandwich and why does it taste and feel this way???
In that moment, you are faced with two choices.
Choice one - spit it out, then go for the next bite. Chewing is paused, then you go back to chewing when you’re done dealing with the issue. Spitting out food is gross. It’s embarrassing. It’s not polite if you’re with a group of people. It’s not something we generally do once we are taught not to do it, right? But you may choose to do it in this situation, allowing the drama to play itself out naturally albeit uncomfortably along one possible path.
Choice two - keep chewing, assume that nothing is that sandwich is all that dangerous, then swallow and keep going with the next bite. Chewing is paused, then you back to chewing when you’re done dealing with the issue. Was that the right choice? Doesn’t matter. There is no right or wrong in this little example. Again, you allowed the drama to play out naturally along a different and also uncomfortable path.
In our little story, time continues to pass and that uncomfortable moment - encountering something unexpected in your sandwich - was temporary.
Now imagine what happens if you decide that you should totally stop chewing and just sit there. Something isn’t right with that last bite, but you don’t want to swallow and you don’t want to spit it out because both choices are less than optimal. You just stop chewing. You sit there, trying to think of a way to resolve this situation without experiencing discomfort or uncertainty. Can you think of another resolution other than swallowing or spitting out that last bite? I bet you can’t. But you remain there, no longer chewing, attempting valiantly to find a way out of this horrible mess.
Discomfort on one side. Discomfort on the other. So you choose neither. You are now locked in that moment attempting to fix something that cannot really be fixed if you don’t let it play itself out.
Then something else happens. Because no human can sit forever with a mouth full of sketchy peanut butter and jelly, nature is going to run its course no matter what you do. You’ll have to either swallow or spit it out. If you choose neither at some point saliva will do its job and the choice will be made for you. You’re gonna eat the questionable bits. While you wait for time to force the situation into a natural resolution, you get more and more uncomfortable. You’re trying to stop the clock because you don’t want to do either thing, but time does not stop and everything is temporary, including odd tasting sandwich bites.
Do you see where this silly little story is going? When we are anxious and afraid and fighting against that state with all our might, we are fighting against the natural progression of everything. Fear comes, then goes. Uncertainty rises, then falls. Anxiety peaks, then dissipates. Panic maxes out, then wanes. Thoughts come, then go.
Time flushes EVERYTHING down the drain. Everything. We can accept that or not, but we don’t get to stop that, change that, or control that. So we fight. And in the fighting, we find even greater discomfort.
Why would I tell anxious, struggling Drew that everything is temporary if he would just allow it? Because his default reaction was to try to fix what was wrong in any given moment. To resist it. To fight against it. To hang on. Present Drew knows that this was a huge waste of energy and time. It made things worse. Trying to stop time so I would not go crazy or die in the next minute was pointless. I would have done much better had I let go sooner and more consistently and let things play out naturally, even the crappy uncomfortable things.
Core principle number two. Everything is temporary, if we let it be. Letting go and allowing things to play out - even big emotions, scary sensations, and bad memories - is very difficult. But we are designed to experience these transient states of variable discomfort and no matter what we do, what we feel and think right now - as important as they may seem in this moment - are going to change. The Universe will have it no other way.
Was this 1100 words to say, “This too shall pass?” Maybe, but I’d like to think that I said it in way you can actually connect with rather than just as an attempt to soothe and convince yourself of something your anxious brain doesn’t believe. Yes, this too shall pass, and it will pass with a lesson and valuable experience if you are willing to let it.
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