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Angustia: no way out!

  Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae describes anxiety as a narrowing (from Latin angustia - narrowness): "Anxiety is that which so takes possession of the mind as to leave no opening for escape" It is sorrow so intense it "binds the soul" and "shuts out all hope" The soul becomes trapped, unable to find a way out. This image is precise: anxiety feels like being in a space that keeps getting smaller, the walls pressing in. Aquinas's proposed remedies all point towards "dilatatio" (expansion) : -Grace as "enlargement and strengthening" of the soul. A distraction that provokes a "dilatatio" (expansion) and therefore:  -Joy and love causing the heart to widen -Hope opening what anxiety has closed -Contemplation of truth delighting more than pain saddens This is grace - not as theological abstraction, but as lived experience of sudden release. My frustration:  Around my 20s when I was trying to deepen Catholicism, I bega...

Eventually my Buddha is smiling

 


When you finally reach the point where you can't escape reality. A time when you suddenly and clearly see what you never wanted to recognise as true. And you finally give up trying to relate to certain people—people you simply couldn't imagine leaving behind. They are family, or very close friends. Although so disturbingly nasty... No, not nasty—malicious. And yet you never considered it possible that they did what they continuously did to you on purpose: deliberately wanting you to suffer.

You tried to comprehend their totally unjustified malice. You tried to talk whenever possible—though their so-called "talking" was patronising lectures on how bad you were to them. But no, there was no way to untangle their spite.

Until suddenly, something happens inside of you. It comes abruptly, unpredicted. Like a thread stretched too thin that breaks. All at once, the emotional exhaustion reaches its limit. Your empathy has been stretched too thin and suddenly snaps. Everything disappears and stops existing. From that astonishing void, you finally emerge. You feel nothing but inner freedom. And you're surprised because it was an unexpected blow that came on its own from somewhere inside you and immediately switched everything off. It was over.

The curtain closes. There's nothing more to say or do. Everything is gone, lost, finished. Probably it was never there. Affection, love, the joy of togetherness—these were your fantasies, a sweetened vision born of naive hope that didn't match reality.

So now it's over. The drama has stopped. Only silence, peace, and a free horizon.

You look back and you finally feel clean. Their sticky dirt is gone. It is theirs, not yours.

End of story.

Soon it's Christmas... I look around and I see my space and my time belonging to me now. I still find it almost impossible: this freedom, this wide open horizon, no voracious predators stalking me—just the lightness and the Light... and here my smiling Buddha appears! I have to get used to the fact that it's really over now.

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