Upending Impending Doom

Games egos play

There is one giant impending doom that we all live with, which we mostly manage to ignore. The absolute knowledge that we will each die someday, although terrifying in itself, is about the only thing we can know for certain about our futures. Given our precarious mortality, a sense of doom is a reasonable thing to have. However, most of the time, when we sense impending doom, it is not about an actual threat to our lives, but any of the innumerable imaginable threats to our egos.

Egos are what experience all of the threats to our personal existence. They inhabit an imaginary world where they are the central character to whom everything happens. Because egos are imaginary entities, living within imaginary worlds, it is easy for them to imagine all kinds of ways that they might cease to exist. Egos are a product of our minds. They are what we imagine to be ourselves, we who live and breathe in a real world and have real world problems. Any one of those problems or a complex combination of many of them can leave us with a sense of impending doom.

The feeling of impending doom is stressful and painful, so it is not a feeling we want to endure for long. Recognizing when we experience a sense of doom, a credible fear of the future, gives us the opportunity to work with the feeling and turn it around. The natural instinct with difficult feelings is to turn away from them. When we do that, the feelings will persist and eat away at us. The thoughtful response to a difficult feeling is to feel into it and see what it’s about. With those feelings of impending doom, we can use our absolute impending doom to help create perspective.

Relative impending doom is when we have to take a test that we haven’t prepared for. Absolute impending doom is that we are mortal. Generally, with our everyday senses of doom the gap between the relative doom and the absolute is huge. Doing poorly on an exam will not injure us physically, but it would be a blow to the ego. Taking a deep breath to affirm that we are alive and well, is the first step in addressing a sense of dread and creating some space for a new perspective to emerge.

The practice of engaging thoughtfully with a sense of impending doom is an act of self compassion. Taking time to be with the uncomfortable feeling, and doing what we can to help it pass, can upend the habit of living in fear and foster a sense of appreciation for being alive. The idea that the relative threats are to an ego entity may not help as much the deep breath, but when the ego goes away, so does the sense of impending doom. Until then, we can feel the fear and be grateful to be alive to feel it.