Blog

Hard to believe that it’s already a decade old, but one of my favorite books of the past few years is English author Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. I won’t bog you down with a complete plot rundown of the novel, but it’s a doozy of modern pathos, befuddlement, and inexorable tragedy.

Two parts of the novel in particular have stayed with me.

For one, a scene occurs in a pub as our protagonist bellies up to the bar at the conclusion of a genuinely terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad day. As our man in Britannia decompresses into his pint of bitters and peruses the food offerings, he’s intrigued that the fish and chips option features fries that are “hand-cut.” (Remember that “chips” equal “freedom fries,” ya yank.) Fancying some thinly sliced frites, he asks the bartender that they be prepared in just that way. The barkeep, however, demurs and claims that the chips are one-size-fits-all and therefore not cut to order. Our hero proceeds to throw a depressive tantrum: “I’ve had a VERY BAD DAY and demand that your ostensibly ‘hand-cut’ chips in fact be freshly shaved by human dexterity, and slenderly so!”

Dude eventually gets thrown out of the bar. English pubs FTW!

Then there’s the book's last sentence, and it’s a bit of a gag: the punchline to The Sense of an Ending is that there isn’t one. Barnes concludes his novel with the observation, “There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.” House lights back up.

What an apt slogan for our age, and for ourselves. There is unrest all around, and 2022 promises to contain as much unrest as ever.

Here’s a thought to try on, though–––unrest and anxiety are actually kind of new things. At one level, diagnoses of anxiety disorder have soared since the late 20th century, but from a longer perspective, historians of various stripes have argued that Westerners’ penchant for constant introspection has only appeared on the world stage fairly recently as a facet of modernism. There have of course been antecedents to our current condition, ranging from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (the first psychological autobiography, c. 400 AD) to Hieronymus Bosch’s wild paintings of surreal landscapes in the early Renaissance (check them out! crazy stuff). Still, it was someone like Freud that cemented what’s been called humanity’s “inward turn”; for Sigmund, it’s not only that you are who you are according to your deepest consciousness, but even more than that, your identity stems from your sub-conscious self.

This is part of why people truly are more anxious than we used to be. For better or for worse, we’ve become congenital self-interrogators, continual inspectors of our own interiors. No wonder that we’re plagued with great unrest.

Don’t get me wrong. None of us can turn back the historical clock and magically cease to consider what’s going on inside of us. However, as the unrest is all too real for me, here’s a Bible verse that I’ve been carrying into the new year: “You [God] keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in the Lord” (Isaiah 26:3). It works great as a breath prayer, like this:

[Inhale] You keep him/her in perfect peace
[Exhale] Whose mind is stayed on you
[Inhale] Because he/she trusts
[Exhale] In the Lord

Even though I can’t wind back the years to an earlier period of history, I’m yet able to ask the living Lord to wind me back down to an inner place of peace and calm. And in my mind, this prayer exercise is more than simply mindfulness, since I’m praying for a Spirit other than my own to do a work in me often beyond my own ability. Why don’t you try it?

If I could self-soothe, I would. But I’m afraid that it’s above my pay grade to achieve because there’s too much unrest within me.

And pass those hand-cut chips my way.

Share