My Second Existential Crisis
Growing up my dad had various sales jobs, including one selling Catholic-themed knick-knacks door to door. Evidently the market for Pope clocks wasn’t that big and he moved on to other opportunities. He eventually found his career in selling life insurance. I remember him laying on the floor in the living room making cold calls from the phone book trying to setup appointments. As the kids say these days, he really did the hustle and grind.
Many of these appointments were in the evenings. My dad, like me, had poor vision. He had dislocated lenses as a child, but unlike me they removed them when he was a teenager. This meant he had no natural lenses and therefore wore these huge lenses in his glasses. To me, he looked like a cross between Kermit the Frog and an explorer looking through binoculars. He was able to somehow get his driver’s license but didn’t totally feel safe driving at night and instead my mom would drive him around and wait in the car while he did his sales calls.
One very cold winter evening, I tagged along for one of these appointments. It was out of town in a nearby little community back where I grew up in Newfoundland. I loaded into the backseat of our old Ford station wagon, which had no readily available seat belts as was the custom back then, and we headed out.
I had recently gotten glasses and given my memories of the car and where we lived, I would place my age around four to six years old. Although I had glasses, my vision back then was still poor compared to normal vision. Only my left eye had enough vision to read but despite that it was a far improvement from what I had had before. I remember just after starting to wear my glasses, I was sitting in the back seat of that same car and looking through the window. I saw the moon and asked my mother for confirmation, as I had never seen it before. As an adult, my mother later told me upon answering my question she quietly wept in the front seat. Having a sick kid wasn’t easy and could be heart breaking at times.
Getting back to the night of that fateful insurance appointment, we waited in the cold for a very long time. Having discovered the moon and a handful of stars and planets, my bored mind began to consider things. Here I was, just a little kid in a car on a cold and clear winter night. In all the world I was just a tiny insignificant thing. I would live and die mostly unnoticed and make no real impact on the vastness of our planet. But our planet itself was only tiny compared to the Sun and other planets I had read about in my books at school and at home. As I weighted this in my mind, something deep inside me started to emerge. It was an overwhelming fear and it started to grow. I then considered the Milky Way which I was also aware of and how tiny the Earth was in comparison to that. Then, if the universe was so very big, did it have an end?
It was at that point that my inner fear and terror completely burst from within. I remember crying and being very upset. My mother couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and I could not adequately explain it as I was struggling to even breathe. My Dad shortly thereafter arrived back to the car to the utter chaos I was causing. I remember that I felt like I was about to die, and before that my little brain was going to explode. Eventually, of course, I must have cried myself to sleep and awoke as my father carried me into the house to bed.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I was an odd little kid with many thoughts that should not have burdened someone so young. I later learned that my experience was somewhat of a panic attack and that I wasn’t in the process of dying. It wasn’t my first one, it surely won’t be my last. Even now, all these years later, if I sit and think about the vastness of the universe, I get a little uneasy.
Panic attacks are real and can be very frightening. The good news is that they are now well understood and there is lots of help available. For me, there are many things that help, and the most important one is being able to know the signs of when one is approaching. Sometimes that’s not possible, but when it is I can start to calm myself by meditating, distracting my mind, and other tools I’ve learned. Exposure therapy can also be incredibly helpful if panic attacks are triggered by places and things.
My experience also reminds me that many of the day-to-day things we worry about aren’t important. I try to remember that to not be an insignificant speck of dust in comparison to the vastness of our planet and of the universe, I need to think beyond myself. I have had the privilege of knowing people that have changed their part of the world for the better. These have included doctors and other medical professionals, family members, and people I’ve met. I am where I am today because of all the help and kindness that those people have given me. Even now, my friends and family help sustain me as I struggle with my health and day to day life.
Lately, it feels as though there are vast resources being utilized to make us angry and to divide us against each other. Populism and its rhetoric can be very insidious. People I have known for decades now spew hate and anger online. Yes, we live in a vast world and a vast universe, but it’s a world we must share. None of us are making it out of here alive and that means we need to work together to our mutual benefit.
I know that we can make a difference in the world, and it starts by being kind to others. That can just be comforting a small child and carrying them off to bed, after a cold night of dread.
PS: Thank you to my friend EB, for reminding me of this memory by sending me a fun video explaining the scale of our planet versus the universe.
PPS: Yes, he really did sell Pope clocks, among other things.