Starting two weeks ago, I’ve been living in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anyone, and really have no good reason to be.
And with my typical lack of planning or foresight, I managed to arrive at a time when there are anti-government protests going on day and night. I can hear them outside my window right now — horns, drums, whistles, cowbells, and a large mass of people chanting, “Resign!” in the local language.
I don’t mean to make it sound bad because it’s not. Mostly I’m having a great time here.
But, with the uncertainty and the language barrier and the constant cowbells, there are many moments when I get anxious. Out of nowhere, my brain will serve up scenarios of trouble, danger, and pain that could happen to me, all alone and unprotected in this great big world.
When those moments pop up, and they pop up often, I go back to a passage I read in Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics:
“You do not have to answer the telephone. You do not have to obey. You can, if you choose, totally ignore the telephone bell.”
Maltz is using the telephone as a metaphor (metonym?) for anxiety-causing events and thoughts. If you too get anxious thoughts now and soon after, maybe this metaphor will help you. Plus I’d like to add two things to what Maltz wrote.
First, you don’t have to feel guilty because the phone started to ring.
In other words, just because bad thoughts popped up in your head, this doesn’t make it more likely you will in fact experience trouble, danger, and pain. You can be plenty successful in life, even with a constantly ringing phone line.
Second, this is not some Deepak Chopra-ish claim that you can always be happy and healthy if you just set your mind to it.
If the phone rings while you’re napping, you will wake up. There’s no sense in pretending that you’re still asleep. But you can go to another room where the ringing isn’t as loud… or you can even put on some Brian Eno ambient music, to drown out the ringing until the damn thing shuts up.
Speaking of incessant rattling:
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