It’s alarming to realise just how much of our lives we spend not doing things we want to or should be doing. We talk about ‘not getting around to things’ as if it were merely a failure of organisation or will. But often, the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure we never get around to them. It’s an old story: some task – or some entire domain of life – makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don’t go there. You’re scared that a pain in your abdomen may be a sign of something serious, so you avoid seeing a doctor. Or you’re worried that raising a sensitive subject with your partner could lead to a blazing argument – so you never do. Several times, I’ve avoided checking my email for fear of discovering a message from someone impatient I haven’t replied to yet.
Rationally speaking, this kind of avoidance makes no sense at all. If the pain really is something serious, confronting the situation is the only way you can begin to do something about it. And there’s no better strategy than avoiding your inbox to ensure that someone will, eventually, lose patience with your failure to reply. The more you organise your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems. Even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known in self-help circles as ‘remaining in your comfort zone’, because there’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, this state entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort – an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn’t – as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety.
I learned a new way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a book titled Time Surfing. Loomans refers metaphorically to the tasks or areas of life you’re avoiding as ‘gnawing rats’. But he rejects the conventional advice about dealing with them, which is to confront your rats – to get over yourself, in other words, and to attack the problem with brute force. The trouble is that this simply replaces one kind of adversarial relationship with your gnawing rats (‘Stay away from me!’) with another (‘I’m going to destroy you!’). And that’s a recipe for more avoidance over the long term, because who wants to spend their life fighting rats? Loomans’ surprising advice is to befriend them instead. Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them.
But how, exactly, do you forge a relationship with a metaphorical gnawing rat? It might mean finding the least intimidating next step, or asking someone else for help, or merely closing your eyes and visualising yourself taking an action. All you’re seeking is some way to ‘go there’, psychologically speaking: to begin to accept, on an emotional level, that the situation in question is already a part of your reality, no matter how much you might wish it weren’t.