Everything Depends on Anxiety
Harnessing anxiety and longing for personal growth
“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate”. — Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Since childhood, I have often felt a disquieting, intense longing for something transcendent. To fuse with music at a concert, to go back to a beautiful moment in the past, to be diffused into the warm haze of summer twilight. The feeling has a spectrum ranging from deep melancholy to relish, sometimes laden with intense angst and other times, bittersweet nostalgia.
The feelings were isolating and pervasive and made understanding my emotions sometimes overwhelming. Why did I suffer and yearn at the same time? When I decided to face the feelings directly, I found comfort in Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety because he describes the ambiguous mix of longing and anxiety (“sympathetic antipathy”) as an essential human experience.
“There is not one single living human being who does not…secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety…
