“Unanxious presence.” The term is said to have come first from Edwin Friedman, a rabbi and therapist. I recall it being described as an important part of leadership (It is highly questionable that I fulfilled this requirement when I had such a role). It doesn’t mean apathy or ignorance of reality—just as courage is not an absence of fear, but a choice made in the face of it.
And so, “unanxious” rather than “calm” — I see it as implicit acknowledgement of things that are certainly anxiety-inducing. It is understandable if we feel perpetually on a precipice. Steven Wright said of that feeling when you tilt a chair back but you don’t quite fall back: “I feel like that all the time.”
Being unanxious is not numbness, denial or indifference, but a choice of response.
… or suggest, or fantasize, by having a song title, Gravity Hereby Suspended?
According to all current science, gravity cannot be suspended. Apparently when anti-matter was discovered, it was thought for a while that anti-gravity might be discovered or made to follow, but no.
There is the thing called weightlessness, a sensation due to falling motion. That’s what causes the experience of weightlessness in earth orbit; the spacecraft is actually falling around the planet, until it deliberately re-enters atmosphere. It’s not that there is no gravity there—otherwise spacecraft would not achieve orbit but just head right out into the beyond.
For now, at least, cancellation or suspension of gravity exists only in science fiction.
No matter. Physical gravity isn’t what concerns us personally. What concerns us personally is what we feel when we observe that someone we care about, or see on the street, has the world on their shoulders. It is the anxiety that weighs you down. It is the heavy load you carry at the office, hospital or classroom. It is the “gravity of the situation” in some part of the world, the world itself, or maybe the country you still love but no longer recognize.
That gravity can be suspended, although of course not removed from experience. How? A big one: Artistic appreciation or even better, trusting yourself to create something: a sketch or painting, a vase, a song, a poem, your autobiography, a snow angel. A smile.
Go for it. Suspend gravity.
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Links to Gravity Hereby Suspended, an instrumental:
“Obligato” (Italian “obbligato”) is used in music notation to emphasize that a certain part is not optional. This is not to be confused with the Spanish “obligado,” although it actually carries much the same meaning: something essential, indispensable, but in a more general sense. Then there is the Portuguese, “obbrigado,” which is an expression of thanks—maybe in the way someone of my Dad’s generation would say, “Much obliged.”
But let me back up a bit.
I am reflecting on it here as the title of my most recent instrumental. I wasn’t thinking of any of the above when it came to me as a title. Honestly, it came into my head and I liked the sound of it. Then I realized from where and when, for me, the word had come: Before I went away to study music at university, I sang in the home church choir. Then, as I recall, it was used to refer to a part, an ornamentation, an embellishment, above the melody line. If so, that wasn’t exactly correct (as if it mattered then any more then than it does now). I just really liked the sound of the word as it came to me. It somehow suited the character of this new thing I had begun putting together.
Now I reflect on it as something more.
I can’t resist a no-doubt-inappropriate mashup of the meanings of the three words with two basic meanings: mandatory (obligato and obligado) and thanks (obbrigado), although I am wary of the potentially darker, even dangerous sense of “obliged” or “obligation” as implying a favour or debt owed (the cinematic world of John Wick comes to mind). And yet, there is something about the two basic meanings of the three words, together, that produces something meaningful, important even:
Obligato/Obligado: Not optional.
Obbrigado: Gratitude (untarnished by anything else).
We could use this mash-up meaning.
That is, we could use more of an active understanding that gratitude is not optional, and/yet is beautiful when it is not forced, or has anything darker attached to it.
For some in high places, some sense of obligation would be a refreshing change. There are those (there are exceptions) who live off the labours of the people and presume that they are obliged to no one for anything. Meanwhile, they offer nothing—except maybe lies.
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