Living in an age of anxiety demands a controlled mind

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): These days, midlife crises comes early. Those who have reached the top of the corporate ladder are getting younger and younger. I hear that the CEO of a new Indonesian dot- com company is barely 24. One of my retreat participants, an Indian, is a CEO of a multimillion-dollar textile company. He's only 37. But he's anxious about many things he thinks he can't control.

A Japanese woman recently called me and asked for some time to talk to me. She's happily married, lives a cozy life with two beautiful children and a loving husband whose performance is highly acclaimed in the company he works for. Yet she is anxious. About what? About things that are not even remotely tangible, like whether her three-year old daughter will marry a good man some day, or whether her seven-year old son will leave her one day to pursue his education in the most reputable university in the world.

When we met she was dumbfounded that the "lady" she saw in front of her, whom she knew only through her articles in this paper, didn't remotely resemble a guru with a white flowing robe, a few wrinkles around her wise eyes and a composed air to her face. And she certainly wasn't the first person to react in this way. The "lady" turned out to be a "girl" eight years her junior, and one, dare I say, youthful enough to deserve the label "funky". Well, sorry to disappoint you ma'am, I said, but these days midlife crises comes early. And besides, don't look for a guru figure, you'll be disappointed. You are your own guru and disciple.

Let's look around us. Almost everything offers a 24-hour service now: 24-hour banking, 24-hour cafes, 24-hour customer service, 24-hour round-the-corner convenience stores. And no doubt if it were possible employers would like to employ blank- faces-in-ties-and-suits for 24-hours a day as well. We have such advanced communication systems nowadays: handphone (you can be reached 24-hours a day), e-mail, satellite, cable, etc. But do we now have more time for ourselves because of these technological breakthroughs that are supposed to have streamlined our daily activities and schedule? Hardly. As a result of all this user friendliness, we have become more anxious.

We are running out of time all the time; we are pushed to decide and produce more in a shorter timescale: "I want it this morning" or "I need the report this evening." How often do you feel your stomach churn when you hear your boss' voice squeak through the speaker phone on your desk, always perfectly timed for the moment when you are about to leave for lunch or go home to your sleeping children? Come on, no excuse for delays with this kind of technology at our fingertips. And do you notice how you suddenly become rude when you have a one-day old unanswered e-mail in your inbox, while previously you only replied to your folks' letters once in a blue moon and they received them contentedly? And the next thing you know, you're spending the entire morning every morning answering these piles of e-mail and leaving other things unattended until you feel too rushed to finish them! How you miss the good old days!

And we say smugly to those with a Sabbath tradition -- the Muslims have Friday, the Christians have Sundays -- that everyday is a sacred day for us. But the reality is a far cry from this. We just don't have time to "waste": to go on a nature walk, to sit quietly just for the sake of it, to listen to music, to daydream (it's a luxury available only to those few "unproductive lazy bums"). Feel how your head swells when you can say to your friends "I am extremely busy." Today, busyness is a status symbol. If you are not busy, you are a nobody. I have another demanding job these days, and I am so busy I find little time to write or meditate. I feel exalted in one way, and bereaved in another since I'm missing the private moments I so much cherished.

This is the age of anxiety. This has been said since ummm ... let me think, at least 2500 years ago when the young, handsome prince Siddharta left his high-walled castle, and the luxurious, sensuous pleasure it contained, to find answers to his and the entire human race's anxiety: the answers to their sufferings. I recently inherited an old, dust-covered, musty book of lectures by an Indian mystic, Swami Rama Thirta, delivered to an American audience in San Francisco during the period 1902-1903. In his talks, he referred to the era in which they lived as "the age of anxiety." So, it is safe to say that every age is the age of anxiety.

Perhaps we would like to think our era is relatively more demanding than the time of our grandparents; however human problems are basically the same from age to age, from continent to continent, from culture to culture. The age old enigma is how to conquer this wild, wandering mind that creates so much craving and misery. This makes the Buddha's teachings eternally relevant, a fountain of eternal wisdom that people from all religious backgrounds can cherish without betraying their own beloved faith or belief system.

We are trapped in our anxiety when we let our restless mind get hold of ourselves. We don't realize it, we can't help it and the next thing we know we feel lost. Where am I going? What am I doing? Why am I here? Where has the time gone?

We need to slow down. We need to stop sometimes. Watch your heart beating. It beats constantly and it seems so tireless, but it is only so because it actually stops between each beat. Watch your mind. Watch your speech and action. Taste and feel the texture of the food you are eating. Take time to serve others. Do those things that quiet the mind and open the heart. Then you will begin to notice what's going on in yourself and in your life. We need to reclaim the lost Sabbath in our hectic days; a time to ourselves.