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OK, imagine you’re walking along a peaceful sidewalk. It’s a lovely afternoon, the sun caresses your face. You feel the scent of geraniums floating in the air. Then all of a sudden, you hear a snapping sound coming from above. You look up and you see a large piano falling toward you. You step aside at the last moment before it kills you. And you’ve just gotten a bag full of interesting stuff: trauma, fear, and stress. They’re not identical, but they have something in common: time. Let’s talk about the nature of stress.

The Nature of Stress Is Related to the Future

There’s something funny about the nature of stress, fear, and trauma. I’ve already argued that they have time in common. However, what I haven’t yet mentioned is that each one has a different relation to time. Let’s take as an example the falling piano.

Walking away from the scene of your would’ve-been horrible death, you feel shocked. Time passes and you might feel alright eventually, or you might develop an anxiety about pianos or about walking along sidewalks. This is trauma and it’s a feeling connected to the past.

Now, let’s focus on the moment you saw the piano falling toward you. You were very afraid. And that fear was situated neither in the past nor in the future but in the hear-and-now. We are never afraid yesterday or tomorrow, we are afraid in the present moment.

And so, as human consciousness is invariably connected with temporal awareness, the nature of stress is the projection of trauma and fear into the future. As you walk along a sidewalk, you begin to feel stressed and anxious. Naturally, the reason is that you remember the past experience and you can anticipate what might occur to you should it repeat itself.

The Human Curse/Blessing of Memory and Anticipation

As I had mentioned in the article about humans seeking simple answers to complex questions, our relationship to time is odd:

[Reflection] endows man with that thoughtfulness which so completely distinguishes his consciousness from that of the animal, and through which his whole behaviour on earth turns out so differently from that of his irrational brothers. He far surpasses them in power and in suffering. They live in the present alone; he lives at the same time in the future and the past. They satisfy the need of the moment; he provides by the most ingenious preparations for his future, nay, even for times that he cannot live to see. They are given up entirely to the impression of the moment, to the effect of the motive of perception; he is determined by abstract concepts independent of the present moment.
(Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 1 st ed. 1958. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. p 36)

Although some higher animals can and do remember – therefore they do feel trauma – their relationship to the future is much different. As far as I know, humans are the only creature of this planet who are gripped by the fear of dying, an event that for most would not occur for decades.

“Live in the Moment” and Other New Age Catchphrases

Hello seeker! Welcome to the New Age – the time when a seeker is born every moment.

To try and “live in the moment” will never work the way New Age groups and gurus advertise. Our human nature is such that doesn’t allow it, because we are temporal beings. What you can do, however, is to try and put time in perspective. Here’s another New Age catchphrase: “There are things you can change and things you can’t change. If you can change something, no need to stress! For you can change it. Whereas, if you can’t change something… well, you shouldn’t stress either, since you can’t change it anyway.”

What this little kōan means – the way I want to understand it, anyway – is to have a perspective on things. The nature of stress is temporal, yes. It has to do with the future, indeed. But there are gradations of such “threats”. It’s one thing to stress about something imminent, such as a dentist visit the same afternoon. It’s entirely another thing to stress about something that, most probably, will occur only decades later, such as dying.

But guess what’s the worst kind of stress: the atemporal one, meaning the one which is not predicated on a fixed time in the future. Our original example, with the falling piano, is such a case. If the experience has caused you to be stressed in general, every time you walk along a sidewalk, this is because it creates a link between the present and a probabilistic future. That is, a future that might occur at some entirely undefined future point.

The problem of course then is, are you really ready to spend an entire lifetime chained by such stress?