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The Article
“Anxiety: Challenge by
Another Name” - by James Lincoln Collier
Between my sophomore and junior years at college, a chance came up for
me to spend the summer vacation working on a ranch in Argentina. My
roommate’s father was in the cattle business, and he wanted Ted to see
something of it. Ted said he would go if he could take a friend, and he chose
me. The idea of spending two months on
the fabled Argentine Pampas was exciting. Then I began having second
thoughts. I had never been very far from New England, and I had been homesick
my first few weeks at college. What would it be like in a strange country?
What about the language? And besides, I had promised to teach my younger
brother to sail that summer. The more I thought about it, the more the prospect
daunted me. I began waking up nights in a sweat.
In the end I turned down the
proposition. As soon as Ted asked somebody else to go, I began kicking
myself. A couple of weeks later I went home to my old summer job, unpacking
cartons at the local supermarket, feeling very low. I had turned down
something I wanted to do because I was scared, and had ended up feeling
depressed. I stayed that way for a long time. And it didn’t help when I went
back to college in the fall to discover that Ted and his friend had had a
terrific time.
In the long run that unhappy summer taught me a valuable lesson out of which
I developed a rule for myself: do what makes you anxious; don’t do what makes
you depressed.
I am not, of course, talking about
severe states of anxiety or depression, which require medical attention. What
I mean is that kind of anxiety we call stage fright, butterflies in the
stomach, a case of nerves—the feelings we have at a job interview, when we’re
giving a big party, when we have to make an important presentation at the
office. And the kind of depression I am referring to is that downhearted
feeling of the blues, when we don’t seem to be interested in anything, when
we can’t get going and seem to have no energy.
I was confronted by this sort of
situation toward the end of my senior year. As graduation approached, I began
to think about taking a crack at making my living as a writer. But one of my
professors was urging me to apply to graduate school and aim at a teaching
career. I wavered. The idea of trying
to live by writing was scary--a lot more scary than
spending a summer on the Pampas, I thought. Back and forth I went, making my
decision, unmaking it. Suddenly, I realized that every time I gave up the
idea of writing, that sinking feeling went through me; it gave me the blues.
The thought of graduate school
wasn’t what depressed me. It was giving up on what deep in my gut I really
wanted to do. Right then I learned another lesson. To avoid that kind of
depression meant, inevitably, having to endure a certain amount of worry and
concern. The great Danish philosopher Sovren Kierkegaard believed that anxiety always arises
when we confront the possibility of our own development. It seems to be a
rule of life that you can’t advance without getting that old, familiar,
jittery feeling.
Even as children we discover this
when we try to expand ourselves by, say, learning to ride a bike or going out
for the school play. Later in life we get butterflies when we think about
having that first child, or uprooting the family from the old hometown to
find a better opportunity halfway across the country. Any time, it seems,
that we set out aggressively to get something we want, we meet up with
anxiety. And it’s going to be our traveling companion, at least part of the
way, into any new venture.
When I first began writing magazine articles, I was frequently required to
interview big names--people like Richard Burton, Joan Rivers, sex authority
William Masters, baseball-great Dizzy Dean. Before each interview I would get
butterflies and my hands would shake.
At the time, I was doing some
writing about music. And one person I particularly admired was the great
composer Duke Ellington. On stage and on television, he seemed the very model
of the confident, sophisticated man of the world. Then I learned that
Ellington still got stage fright. If the highly honored Duke Ellington, who
had appeared on the bandstand some 10,000 times over 30 years, had anxiety
attacks, who was I to think I could avoid them? I went on doing those frightening
interviews, and one day, as I was getting onto a plane for Washington to
interview columnist Joseph Alsop, I suddenly realized to my astonishment that
I was looking forward to the meeting. What had happened to those butterflies? Well, in truth, they were still there, but
there were fewer of them. I had benefited, I discovered, from a process psychologists call “extinction.” If you put an
individual in an anxiety-provoking situation often enough, he will eventually
learn that there isn’t anything to be worried about.
Which brings us to a corollary to
my basic rule: you’ll never eliminate anxiety by avoiding the things that
caused it. I remember how my son Jeff was when I first began to teach him to
swim at the lake cottage where we spent our summer vacations. He resisted,
and when I got him into the water he sank and sputtered and wanted to quit.
But I was insistent. And by summer’s end he was splashing around like a
puppy. He had “extinguished” his anxiety the only way he could--by
confronting it.
The problem, of course, is that it is one thing to urge somebody else to take
on those anxiety-producing challenges; it is quite another to get ourselves
to do it.
Some years ago I was offered a
writing assignment that would require three months of travel through Europe.
I had been abroad a couple of times on the usual “If it’s Tuesday this must
be Belgium” trips, but I hardly could claim to know my way around the
continent. Moreover, my knowledge of foreign languages was limited to a
little college French. I hesitated.
How would I, unable to speak the language, totally unfamiliar with local
geography or transportation systems, set up interviews and do research? It
seemed impossible and with considerable regret I sat down to write a letter
begging off. Halfway through, a thought--which I subsequently made into
another corollary to my basic rule--ran through my mind: you can’t learn if
you don’t try. So I accepted the assignment.
There were some bad moments. But
by the time I had finished the trip I was an experienced traveler. And ever
since, I have never hesitated to head for even the most exotic of places,
without guides or even advanced bookings, confident that somehow I will
manage. The point is that the new, the
different, is almost by definition scary. But each time you try something,
you learn, and as the learning piles up, the world opens to you.
I’ve made parachute jumps, learned
to ski at 40, flown up the Rhine in a balloon. And I know I’m going to go on
doing such things. It’s not because I’m braver or more daring than others.
I’m not. But I don’t let the butterflies stop me from doing what I want.
Accept anxiety as another name for challenge and you can accomplish wonders.
(Reprinted from Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition, by
Alfred Rosa and Paul Eschholz, eds. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1989.)
(Taken from: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SBbkAZSY-8IJ:ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/6/2534/wb2409.doc+anxiety+challenge+by+another+name+james+collier+argentina+pampas&cd=1&hl=pt-BR&ct=clnk&gl=us)
A sample summary of Collier’s essay:
In the
essay “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name,” the author James Lincoln Collier
shares his discoveries concerning anxiety.
Collier’s point is that though many of us see anxiety as a negative
thing, anxiety can all be a great motivator and teacher. Collier begins by defining anxiety by using
examples from his own experience. From
these experiences, Collier developed three observations regarding
anxiety: the first is that we should do
what makes us anxious and avoid what makes us depressed. The second is that to be successful and
avoid depression, we have to be willing to endure a certain amount of worry
and concern. The third is that, rather
than avoid those experiences that make us anxious, we should rather experience
them until the anxiety they produce is reduced or eliminated.
The Assignment:
Directions: Using Collier’s essay as your source, please create the
following:
1.
Two examples of a lead-in followed by the quotation.
2.
One example of a lead-in placed in the middle of a quotation.
3.
Two examples of using an ellipsis.
4.
One paraphrase of a one to two-sentence passage of Collier’s essay.
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