I think I came close to having a panic attack on the train this morning as I made my way to work. I would have written about this earlier, but didn’t think I could explain it properly while in the office.
I was reading a book called The Life Of Pi, which I started over the weekend. It’s a critics’ favourite, and came highly recommended by the girlfriend too.
The passage which set me off was a chapter about the title character’s experiences with various religions. Specifically, their approaches to the concept of a soul and the afterlife. Hindu notions of interconnected individual and world souls was a big part of the text.
For some reason, this really got my heart absolutely pounding, and I found myself breathing heavier, getting hotter, and my mind moving at a million miles a minute. I’ve no experience of panic attacks in any form, but it felt like how I imagine them to be.
I say “for some reason”, but I think I know full well why this passage of text hit me so hard: I am absolutely shit scared of death, and specifically of dying.
I am a devout atheist who believes that there is absolutely nothing after death, and sometimes that belief can be horrifically cold and unsatisfying.
When I was in my teens, I went through a stage of being unable to get to sleep, as my head was filled with thoughts of death, and how short, in the grand scheme of things, life is.
I would be lying in bed, with a cold sweat, and almost in tears at how my consciousness could cease to exist in the blink of an eyelid. I would imagine my last words, my last thoughts, and the all-encompassing nothingness from whence we came and to which we all return.
I haven’t had thoughts like that in a long while, despite experiencing death in personal form a few times since then. Yet today, upon reading this chapter, it all came flooding back to me and I clammed up.
I had to put the book down, take a drink of water, and stare out the window for the rest of the journey.
It scared me that these thoughts could return from nothing. I’ll probably be unable to escape them for a few weeks now, which means some more sleepless nights.
