Everything will come true -- eventually
If you startle a cat it will sink towards the ground, look rapidly around itself, sinews hard and ready for the pending fight or flight that is to come. If the startling noise was something being dropped or a loud vehicle on the street, the cat will realize this, cease the adrenalin pumping, and go on about its business as though nothing is amiss. In fact, it can easily plop down and go to sleep.
We humans can’t seem to master that. We too have the fight-or-flight reaction but when something startles us or seems to be a threat, it takes us a while to regain our composure. Heart is often pounding for a long while after, and feelings of nausea or need for a bathroom don’t pass in a flash. If such horrific threats become chronic, such as for a combat soldier under fire for days or weeks, sometimes the residuals never pass, and we are left with the situation that used to, in times past, be known as shell-shock – later it became war-nerves and finally, battle fatigue.
They say that World War Two’s most highly decorated soldier, Audie Murphy, never really did get past it. He suffered from an elevated pulse rate, verging on tachycardia for most of his life, and was plagued with insomnia and nightmares on an ongoing basis. My grandfather, who was in the trenches in World War One continued to have nightmares until his dying day, which wasn’t until 1958. Forty years of reliving the horrors he’d experienced.
You see, that’s where the cat is better off than we are. The cat cannot relive bad situations, and especially, it cannot intellectualize what happened. Therefore, it can’t worry.
Human beings worry. We worry about everything. We worry about our health and our wealth (or lack thereof), we worry about our mortality, we worry about our marriages and our children, we worry when there isn’t really much to worry about. If we are obsessive in our worrying we can lapse into bad habits like pills or booze to take us temporarily away. We can seek relief through gambling or illicit sexual encounters. Or we can just plain fret.
I’ve often wondered whether people who win big on the lottery, or Bill Gates, or Rupert Murdoch, or Richard Branson, all of whom have more money than a lot of notable countries in the world, worry. What can they worry about? They can never lose all their money. Even McCartney, despite his fight with horrible and grasping ‘Mucca’ doesn’t need to worry about having to resort to tinned beans.
Yet, money is only one worry. There are still the matters of health, mortality, children, and so forth.
Do, I write this because I’m especially worried about something? No, actually I’m not. It all came about because some kid out on the street was making a lot of noise, and the cat crouched in his flight-or-fight pose.
Other than that, I only worry about the same stuff everybody else does – everything.
We humans can’t seem to master that. We too have the fight-or-flight reaction but when something startles us or seems to be a threat, it takes us a while to regain our composure. Heart is often pounding for a long while after, and feelings of nausea or need for a bathroom don’t pass in a flash. If such horrific threats become chronic, such as for a combat soldier under fire for days or weeks, sometimes the residuals never pass, and we are left with the situation that used to, in times past, be known as shell-shock – later it became war-nerves and finally, battle fatigue.
They say that World War Two’s most highly decorated soldier, Audie Murphy, never really did get past it. He suffered from an elevated pulse rate, verging on tachycardia for most of his life, and was plagued with insomnia and nightmares on an ongoing basis. My grandfather, who was in the trenches in World War One continued to have nightmares until his dying day, which wasn’t until 1958. Forty years of reliving the horrors he’d experienced.
You see, that’s where the cat is better off than we are. The cat cannot relive bad situations, and especially, it cannot intellectualize what happened. Therefore, it can’t worry.
Human beings worry. We worry about everything. We worry about our health and our wealth (or lack thereof), we worry about our mortality, we worry about our marriages and our children, we worry when there isn’t really much to worry about. If we are obsessive in our worrying we can lapse into bad habits like pills or booze to take us temporarily away. We can seek relief through gambling or illicit sexual encounters. Or we can just plain fret.
I’ve often wondered whether people who win big on the lottery, or Bill Gates, or Rupert Murdoch, or Richard Branson, all of whom have more money than a lot of notable countries in the world, worry. What can they worry about? They can never lose all their money. Even McCartney, despite his fight with horrible and grasping ‘Mucca’ doesn’t need to worry about having to resort to tinned beans.
Yet, money is only one worry. There are still the matters of health, mortality, children, and so forth.
Do, I write this because I’m especially worried about something? No, actually I’m not. It all came about because some kid out on the street was making a lot of noise, and the cat crouched in his flight-or-fight pose.
Other than that, I only worry about the same stuff everybody else does – everything.
Labels: Worryworryworryworry
posted by Ian Lidster at
3:07 PM
8 Comments
