CHAPTER 1
Situation
We cannot escape being situated – situation being the mode we exist in from our first to our last breath. The sum total of psychological, physical, and historical givens that make up our lives' fluid, ever-changing concrete circumstances – our situation is what shapes and is in turn shaped by us. No sooner do we enter this world than we are threaded into a densely woven fabric of relations, hopes and expectations, freedoms, possibilities and limitations, demands and restrictions, duties and obligations. While being enmeshed with the situations of countless others, each individual life unfolds within the parameters of its own unique circumstances. More or less passively buffeted by our situation's manifold determinant forces at first, we gradually mature into active participants in the continual process of its transformation. As we become responsible agents within the shifting dynamics of our inextricably situated lives, we come to realize that our situation hinges on the core experience of what I summarily call pressure: in the face of the human condition as such, in the face of the concrete external circumstances confronting us at any given moment, and in the face of our own needs, desires, dreams, goals, and aspirations.
This threefold pressure to be, act, and do something at the core of our existence, which both impels and constrains us, manifests itself in different, more or less immediate and palpable, ways – for instance, as the background awareness of the passage of time in general and the concomitant sense that we need to 'get on it'; as a subtle feeling of urgency in the face of the realization that the breadth of our options, choices, and possibilities in life is inversely proportional to our age; as the concrete set of internal and external demands, expectations, and deadlines characterizing any given situation from infancy to old age; as an implicit or explicit sense of what Alan Watts calls "moral urgency" in view of the cultural frameworks (religious, ideological, political) we happen to be emplaced in.
Thus, even the most ostensibly relaxed and pressure-free circumstances will be constitutively permeated by the inexorable undercurrent of pressure at the heart of humanity: the structural pressure exerted by the vise of the beginning and end points of our lives, whose memento mori provides the ground bass to the variegated symphony of all our endeavors. Take, for example, the following situation: I am sitting at my bedroom desk on the top floor of the house we rent every year on Cape Cod toward the end of summer, overlooking the magnificent sand flats of First Encounter Beach during low tide, speckled with seagulls recovering from the most recent hurricane; my wife is reading a story to our youngest son; his brother is engrossed in his own book, while our oldest is somewhere out there, taking a late-morning walk in this most serene of landscapes, where presence is all, where substance and accident appear no longer distinguishable, where the I melds with its surroundings, where peace is manifest in the all-enveloping sough of the echoless chamber of an early September day on the beach ... And still, the white noise of finitude resonates through this quiet after the storm, intermingling with the distant roar of the receding surf of Cape Cod Bay. Somewhere in the recesses of my being, I dimly sense the muffled reverberations of the pulsing of time as a kind of irreducible, subconscious awareness expanding in ever-widening circles: that soon our vacation will be over, that certain things will need to be taken care of right after we get back, as I will be flying to Europe twice in the coming month, that I have several important deadlines looming in the not too distant future, that my oldest son has only two months left until his college exams and that he mustn't miss his application deadlines, that I must double check on our family health plan ... that I am forty-four and that I sometimes feel perhaps I ought to have accomplished more in life by now ...
The majority of situations in our lives, however, are obviously nothing like the one just described, which must remain a rare and cherished exception. It is safe to say that the more typical situation we find ourselves in in the course of any given day will be orchestrated to the relentless ticking of the clock and driven by a mix of private and public needs, duties, responsibilities, and exigencies, which we navigate with greater or lesser calm, contentment, and equipoise depending on our personality, circumstances, emotional state, physical and mental health, etcetera. Still, whether we are ostensibly happy or unhappy hamsters in first-class or economy wheels, whether we lead or straggle in the proverbial rat race – none of us will escape the law of situation. As G. W. F. Hegel observed, both master and slave are caught up in a dialectic of mutual recognition and interdependence – even the most ostensibly omnipotent being cannot help being under pressure to be, act, and do things a certain way to the extent that it needs others to be acknowledged as such. The ball of being, living, acting, and doing has been irrevocably kicked into our court; from the get-go we ineluctably find ourselves in a continual existential zugzwang that we can never seem to be able to live down.
Why is it that our lives transpire by way of an unceasing concatenation of more or less palpably pressure-driven situations, and what does it mean for our everyday lives and interaction with others?
CHAPTER 2
Pressure Points
Whatever else it may be ostensibly motivated or triggered by – an impulse, urge or volition, an order, threat or request – the pressure I am here talking about is fundamentally a function of time. If time didn't pass, there would be no need or urgency to act or do anything now rather than later, or at all, for that matter; pressure would loose its grip on us and vanish into thin air. We are constitutively under pressure to be, act, and do something because we are creatures of time, because we live, act, think, and feel in time – the matrix and horizon of our existence.
As I suggested earlier, we experience the pressure to be, act, and do something at the heart of our situation in three respects: in relation to the human condition as such, in relation to the concrete external circumstances confronting us at any given moment, and in relation to our own needs, desires, dreams, goals, and aspirations. The reason that we experience pressure in a threefold manner has to do with the fact that our experience of time itself is heterogeneous: for we don't experience TIME, writ large – as a monolithic, all-encompassing entity; rather, our experience of time is more like an infinitely extended braid or helix consisting of three major, densely interwoven strands, which I summarily call internal time,external time, and great time.
By internal time I mean the time we live, or are, as embodied psychosomatic beings – the time of our emotions, feelings, desires, urges, sufferings, etcetera. By external time I mean the time in which all else outside us transpires, in which all others live and die; the time created and measured by clocks; the time we all officially live by; the time of history, deadlines, expectations, threats, and laws. By great time, finally, I mean the time of our own finitude – that abstract, virtually unfathomable (from each individual's perspective), yet known, truth that we will all die, that all this – the smells, sounds, tastes, voices, faces, experiences, memories that we wake up to every morning – will one day be dead and gone for us.
This threefold experience of time constitutes the set of existential pressure points through which our situation fundamentally affects us: the pressure point of the self; the pressure point of the other; the pressure point of finitude. Because we simultaneously partake of three temporalities – our own, the other's, and our finitude's – we are entangled in a web of interlocking internal and external forces that inform all our physical, emotional, and mental states as well as everything we do and experience.
What this means for our everyday lives and relationships with others is that we constantly have to juggle the demands of at least three masters who not only don't always see eye to eye, but who frequently disagree and operate at cross-purposes. Thus, we may feel as though time were slipping through our fingers and become restless – metaphysically impatient – in light of finitude's pressure, while our concrete circumstances and the tasks at hand may demand forbearance, steady persistence, or patient endurance; or we may feel that we have all the time in the world, while those around us are getting impatient with us for being lackadaisical or dilatory; or, again, we may worry and continue pushing ourselves even though we ought to have nothing to worry about and relax, having met this or that expectation, requirement or deadline and fulfilled our obligations. This threefold tension at the heart of the everyday often pushes us into reacting rather than acting – into fast-paced, shooting-from-the-hip behaviors that stand in the way of a peaceable, creative, productive, and satisfying response to and engagement with whatever state of affairs or problem may require our attention or action in any given situation: impatience leads to rashness, which leads to sloppiness and unclarity in thinking, feeling, and acting, which makes us dissatisfied with ourselves and causes adverse reactions on the part of those around us, which makes us defensive and, soon enough, resentful, hostile, and aggressive, which leads to violence ...
This pressure cycle, which we play out in myriad variations in the course of our daily lives, is something we have gotten so used to that we tend to forget that it is neither necessary nor unavoidable. We don't have to become impatient, sloppy in thought, word, and deed, and dissatisfied; we don't have to become defensive, resentful, hostile, and aggressive; and we certainly don't need to become violent. If this pressure cycle is neither necessary nor unavoidable, why do we allow ourselves so easily to be swept up in it? Why do we so often succumb to the manifold pressures impinging on us from within and without? Why do we let these pressures dictate our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors?
Underlying these pragmatically-oriented questions is the much more fundamental question: why are we amenable to pressure in the first place? What is it about us that makes us prone to feel pressure? Why do we get stressed about having to finish something by a certain deadline, or having to act and do certain things a certain way? For, if you think about it, there is no real reason to be pressured even though time and conditions may be pressing indeed. After all, we could also simply do what we have to do, finish what we have to finish without feeling pressured.
CHAPTER 3
Fear
The first and last answer to the question of pressure is fear. The majority of external and internal pressures we experience are linked to some form and variation of fear. If we didn't fear consequences – that the good will end (while we want it to last) and the bad will last (while we want it to end), that pleasure will abate and pain will endure, that if we don't do this we (or another) will suffer that – we would hardly ever feel pressured. We would face any given situation, challenge, task, expectation, or demand as it is and freely decide on how and when to act in response to it. Fear is the medium of pressure as time is the medium of fear.
By fear I mean – in the most general terms – that deep-seated overall sense at the heart of our being that, at bottom, all is uncertain and that at any moment anything can happen that might cause us discomfort or pain, harm or derail us, turn our world upside down (– the unpredictability of unbearable suffering and death being the most extreme manifestation in our lives of this uncertainty). It is this fear in all its facets, shades, and gradations – from dread, anxiety, and being scared, to apprehension, nervousness, and concern – that causes us to plan, strive, worry, fret, lie, betray, be submissive, shy, obedient, cowardly, disingenuous, defensive, aggressive, or violent. Fear informs most of our everyday behaviors irrespective of whether we are at the bottom or the top of the totem pole (the white lie being a particularly salient example of the degree to which fear infiltrates even the most trivial circumstances). The most ostensibly powerful among us are as much driven by fear as the most subaltern and disempowered. And while this fear at the heart of our being doesn't always become explicit and isn't always outwardly visible, its subterranean rumblings provide the bass line to the greater part of our existence, reverberating in every decision we make and everything we undertake. Homo sapiens is Homo timens – the fearing animal.
What distinguishes human fear from the animal's is that in addition to its instinctual component – that crucial survival mechanism – it also contains a self-reflexive, more or less conscious, intentional element that exceeds the immediate. Unlike animals, we don't only experience fear instinctually in the face of more or less immediate, concrete physical danger but also (and probably much more so given the relative empirical infrequency of situations in which our survival is concretely at stake) in the face of more abstract, perceived dangers. Thus, we are afraid of not living up to our own and others' expectations, of making a poor impression on our superiors, of being passed over, of embracing the fullness of life ... For us, fear is not merely a basic mode of existence but also a basic mode of interpreting and making sense of the world, predicated on the more or less conscious experience and understanding of time and, more specifically, on our notion and embodied sense of the future. For all fear is fundamentally fear of the future. Eliminate the future – eliminate time – and fear disappears in the face of the sheer what is.
Clearly, though, eliminating time is impossible. We can only live, think, feel, and act in time, which means we are doomed to fear and will, consequently, never be able to extricate ourselves from the chokehold of pressure.
CHAPTER 4
Through a Glass, Darkly
I have so far painted a fairly dark picture of our condition: pressure-burdened and ever-fearful, we are imprisoned in situations that spawn more pressure and more fear in a never-ending cycle. "Surely, though," you will object, "that's not the case all the time, and certainly not for all of us. If you look around, you will find quite a few people who live active, purposeful, successful, and satisfied lives, unafraid and not hamstrung by any of the alleged pressures you mention. They do not rush to judgment, have no problems with aggression and anger management, and certainly don't get violent in word or deed. And since there are so many obvious exceptions to what you purport to be the rule, your argument simply doesn't hold up to reality."
True as it may be that statistically there will probably be a sufficient number of people who seem to be leading well-tempered lives, act with clarity and conviction, and face life's challenges equably yet with determination, passion, and courage, this doesn't mean that what I have depicted as our fundamental situation is a figment of the imagination. By the same token, it would be naïve to deny that we are all constitutively prone to illness and gradual physical (and mental) deterioration only because at any give point in time there are a good many people around who happen to be healthy and physically and mentally fit. What I am saying about our situation mustn't be understood quantitatively or statistically but, rather, essentially: even if, miraculously, you happen to have never in your life consciously felt and submitted to any pressure, or experienced any fear whatsoever, that doesn't mean that both aren't at the core of human existence. Analogously, even if you have never had an accident in all your years as a professional stuntman, or have never had any health issues in spite of a lifetime of smoking, that doesn't mean that, therefore, being a stuntman isn't essentially a dangerous profession, or that smoking isn't essentially detrimental to your health. All theoretical consideration aside, however, for the majority of us it will most likely hold true that we do experience a range of minor and major pressures and fears virtually every day. Just ask yourself how often, lately, you have lived through an entire day without having felt the sting of some variation of pressure and fear – be it in the form of uncertainty, premonition, worry, concern, doubt, anger, or unease.
