Its just a feeling.
Only inside my brain. Its not a reaction to any event as yesterday I was completely happy with where I am strolling in life. But the anxiety bubbles away as I dream and reminds me that I could have chosen to not follow my ambition, I could have made a safe and secure life, I could live without being an artist.
It's an anxiety I get whenever there is some momentous change building up in the future, whenever there is choice I find anxiety about the options. Choice itself is an interesting topic to research, how do people balance their options? what determines 'better / equal / or lesser'?
Where does the anxiety come from - is it essentially a fear of running out of time? of death? would I be anxious if dying was something I avoided ruminating? Is it anxiety because of the time we live in where technology is the dominant shift in industry interest - and not our obvious climate shift?
Todays anxiety could be explained by my personal long drought of paid work, my hormonal tidal wave that finally crashed period blood, the fact that I am about to dedicate 2 or more years of my life to self guided study in Masters by Research, or the fact that my latest work is a large rainbow ceramic tombstone for myself.
These things would make any one person anxious, I can see this from a "normal" perspective. But to tell you the truth, in isolation and when I ignore the greater environmental context of the planet and our finite value alive- Life is good. I was elated yesterday when I found the tombstone beautifully completed in the firing, I was ecstatic when I discovered I was accepted in to study more, and it was relief to see that my hormones can be kicked into gear with the right medication. All together, these good things percolate into a my dream state and combine with the greater anxieties of being alive now, forming a direction that lead to a kind of surreal doom of poverty and inability to help myself or others.
I am sure with climate change concerns and economic employment crisis touted as going to get worse for my particular generation, many people are anxious. Kurt Vonnegut calls these concerns as products from "Big Brains" who, to paraphrase, make their own contexts to make their own problems.
Ads push us to buy more, god-like celebrities make us hungry for more, as soon as we get these material things they are probably not so valuable, Political leaders don't represent our interests, information is so manipulated it may as well be fairytale, the important facts are secrets, our foods are damaging ourselves because we are aggressively cheap, its decadence in some areas, stingy in others - a misalignment of values, or is it misinformation? how did we get so extremely poor and wealthy? intelligent and ignorant? specialised and vague? simultaneously? what matters now? how do we know? aren't we swimming in our own faults!
alive in the now
we are so smart
we can invent
we talk so much
we are dumb
more alive in dreams
growth is so fast
It is turbulent
I was swimming
direction of fools
I am sure that the frustration of watching people with power/ jobs / businesses continuing to ignore the essential ingredients to life is hugely frustrating. Its a kind of pointless intellect if you can see a problem but have no way to communicate it. Sometimes I thank everything I have art.
just keep swimming
