Between my sophomore and junior
years at college, a chance came up for me to spend the summer vacation working
on a ranch in Argentina. My roommate’s father was in the cattle business, and
he wanted Ted to
see something of it. Ted said he would go if he could take a friend,
and he chose me. The idea of spending two months on the fabled Argentine Pampas
was exciting. Then I began having second thoughts. I had never been very far
from New England, and I had been homesick my first few weeks at college. What
would it be like in a strange country? What about the language? And besides, I
had promised to teach my younger brother to sail that summer. The
more I thought about it, the more
the prospect daunted me. I began waking up nights in a sweat. In the end I
turned down the proposition. As soon as Ted asked somebody else to go, I began kicking
myself. A couple of weeks later I went home to my old summer job, unpacking cartons
at the local supermarket, feeling very low. I had turned down something I
wanted to do because I was scared, and had ended up feeling depressed. I stayed
that way for a long time. And it didn’t help when I went back to college in the
fall to discover that Ted and his friend had had a terrific time. In the long
run that unhappy summer taught me a valuable lesson out of which I developed a
rule
for myself: do what makes you
anxious; don’t do what makes you depressed.
I am not, of course, talking about
severe states of anxiety or depression, which require medical attention. What I
mean is that kind of anxiety we call stage fright, butterflies in the stomach,
a case of nerves—the feelings we have at a job interview, when we’re giving a
big party, when we have to make an important presentation at the office. And
the kind of depression I am referring to is that downhearted feeling of the
blues, when we don’t seem to be interested in anything, when we can’t get going
and seem to have no energy. I was confronted by this sort of situation toward
the end of my senior year. As graduation approached, I began to think about
taking a crack at making my living as a writer. But one of my professors was
urging me to apply to graduate school and aim at a teaching career. I wavered.
The idea of trying to live by writing was scary--a lot more scary than spending
a summer on the Pampas, I thought. Back and forth I went, making my decision,
unmaking it. Suddenly, I realized that every time I gave up the idea of
writing, that sinking feeling went through me; it gave me the blues.
The thought of graduate school
wasn’t what depressed me. It was giving up on what deep in my gut I really
wanted to do. Right then I learned another lesson. To avoid that kind of
depression meant, inevitably, having to endure a certain amount of worry and
concern. The great Danish philosopher Sovren Kierkegaard believed that anxiety
always arises when we confront the possibility of our own development. It seems
to be a rule of life that you can’t
advance without getting that old,
familiar, jittery feeling. Even as children we discover this when we try to
expand ourselves by, say, learning to ride a bike or going out for the school
play. Later in life we get butterflies when we think about having that first
child, or uprooting the family from the old hometown to find a better
opportunity halfway across the country. Any time, it seems, that we set out
aggressively to get something we want, we meet up with anxiety. And it’s going
to be our traveling companion, at least part of the way, into any new venture.
When I first began writing magazine
articles, I was frequently required to interview big names--people like Richard
Burton, Joan Rivers, sex authority William Masters, baseball-great Dizzy Dean.
Before each interview I would get butterflies and my hands would shake. At the
time, I was doing some writing about music. And one person I particularly
admired was the great composer Duke Ellington. On stage and on television, he
seemed the very model of the confident, sophisticated man of the world. Then I
learned that Ellington still got stage fright. If the highly honored Duke
Ellington, who had appeared on the bandstand some 10,000 times over 30 years,
had anxiety attacks, who was I to think I could avoid them? I went on doing
those frightening interviews, and one day, as I was getting onto a plane for Washington
to interview columnist Joseph Alsop, I suddenly realized to my astonishment
that I was looking forward to the meeting. What had happened to those butterflies?
Well, in truth, they were still there, but there were fewer of them. I had
benefited, I discovered, from a process psychologists call “extinction.” If you
put an individual in an anxiety-provoking situation often enough, he will
eventually learn that there isn’t anything to be worried about.
Which brings us to a corollary to my
basic rule: you’ll never eliminate anxiety by avoiding the things that caused
it. I remember how my son Jeff was when I first began to teach him to swim at the
lake cottage
where we spent our summer vacations.
He resisted, and when I got him into the water he sank and sputtered and wanted
to quit. But I was insistent. And by summer’s end he was splashing around like
a puppy. He had “extinguished” his anxiety the only way he could--by confronting
it.
The problem, of course, is that it
is one thing to urge somebody else to take on those anxiety-producing
challenges; it is quite another to get ourselves to do it. Some years ago I was
offered a writing assignment that would requir
e three months of travel through
Europe. I had been abroad a couple of times on the usual “If it’s Tuesday this
must be Belgium” trips, but I hardly could claim to know my way around the
continent. Moreover, my knowledge of foreign languages was limited to a little
college French. I hesitated. How would I, unable to speak the language, totally
unfamiliar with local geography or transportation systems, set up interviews
and do research? It seemed impossible and with considerable regret I sat down
to write a
letter begging off. Halfway through,
a thought--which I subsequently made into another corollary to my basic rule--ran
through my mind: you can’t learn
if you don’t try. So I accepted the
assignment. There were some bad moments. But by the time I had finished the
trip I was an experienced
traveler. And ever since, I have
never hesitated to head for even the most exotic of places, without guides or
even advanced bookings, confident that somehow I will manage. The point is that
the new, the different, is almost by definition scary. But each time you try something,
you learn, and as the learning piles up, the world opens to you. I’ve made
parachute jumps, learned to ski at 40, flown up the Rhine in a balloon. And I
know I’m going to go on doing such things. It’s not because I’m braver or more
daring than others. I’m
not. But I don’t let the butterflies
stop me from doing what I want. Accept anxiety as another name for challenge
and you can accomplish wonders.
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