Anxiety

Listening today to Samir Chopra’s Smithsonian webinar “To Be is To Be Anxious” and his quote from Kierkegard – “…we want to live but we are scared to live…” triggered my recall of Sarah Bakewell’s book How to Live. I may read it again. Here is my review from 2011, when we had less to worry about.

https://ncbookbunch.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/the-worlds-first-blogger-montaigne/

I ordered Chopra’s book Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide. The author says to worry is just being human. Thank goodness.

In her review for the Wasington Post, Becca Rothfeld says “{The author’s} goal is to show that, even if we are fated to anxiety by our very nature, we needn’t be anxious about being anxious. Contra those who would abolish every form of friction or frustration, {Chopra} insists that anxiety is a way of honoring who and what we are. It is, in his words, ‘a fundamental human response to our finitude, mortality, and epistemic limitation.’ Who knows what sort of truncated beings we would become without it?”

What, me worry!