Learning to be Alive

In an article in Mind your Body entitled "Put anxiety into words", Dr Douglas Kong, consultant psychiatrist at Mt E, explained that due to socio-cultural factors we are not expressive of our own feelings or do not have the vocabulary to express them. As such anxieties may surface through physical symptoms such as palpitations, breathlessness, insomnia etc. Thus people seek to reduce the symptoms by resorting to drugs, which only help in the short term.

In his book, "Man's Search for Himself", Rollo May, exixtential psychologist, talked about how people try to overcome anxiety through activity. "Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. They get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance."

He goes on to advocate how we should try to be more in touch with ourselves and to have more self awareness in order to be really alive, "Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, is (the need) to recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves". "Self awareness.....brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness- the arts of contemplation and meditation. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something".

He then goes on to quote Robert Louis Stevenson, "To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.”

I feel I can relate to the above, ie. how I occasionally fear being alone doing nothing because of some unexplained anxieties creeping up in me. I would then busy myself to avoid such feelings. I ascribe this to our upbringing where inactivity is perceived as uselessness and lack of importance; and the belief being subconsciously ingrained in us from young that we must work hard to survive (because as a small country we lack resoureces bla bla bla- hahaha blame the government for all your little ills).

I feel it is important for our young people to be given the chance to be creatively idle. It is sad that subjects like Art and Literature are not encouraged by some schools because they are subjects difficult to score. Somehow I am just worried our young people are too busy, multi tasking, balancing heavy workload (be it school or work) with clubbing and other pleasures, sacrificing even sleep to maximise each available hour of the day.

As for me, I am slowly learning to enjoy being myself. For instance I went swimming in a deserted pool yesterday. The touch of water against my body never felt so good.