When the World is Closing in on Us

First published on March 5, 2018

Our world is enormous. We are more connected than we have ever been. Almost all of us, anyway.

And yet sometimes the world closes in.

Like a day when the internet is down, suddenly our world doesn’t feel so big, and we feel somehow trapped, perhaps unable to work. Like a day when snow freezes the roads and the railways, suddenly the size of our world shrinks.

Instead of openness and freedom, our world suddenly feels like a small and frightening place. Each message received feels like it is making the world smaller.

Last week I found my world closing in. Each message I received, each comment online and in real life, felt more like a threat, more like a judgment. There were still glimpses of the openness of reality, but they were fewer and further between. And when I saw them I took the chance to use them, but with the way the world responded, it felt like they just led to the walls of the world getting closer to me.

The normal ways out didn’t work. I was just here, with myself, with the world closing in.

Sometimes I can find my way out of it. Like getting to the station, in the snow, to find that trains in the direction you want to go are still running. Or realising that, actually, there’s a bus you can take. Sometimes, I just have to wait it out. Retreat. Wait until normality resumes. Wait until reality resumes.

It can be crippling, though. For me, these are small things, they last a few weeks.

I have a family member whose world has continued to shrink, and shrink, and shrink. At some point, she couldn’t go out of the house very often. Perhaps this was a tactical retreat, to safety and security, like mine last week. To wait for it to pass. But it didn't.

Then, later, she could only leave the house with help, and it became once a week. Then, later, not at all. But it’s not just the literal ways that the world can shrink, those decisions. It’s the internal ways. Where trust erodes, and assumptions and stories take over. Where suddenly, everything is a threat and nowhere is safe.

Then the world is so small that we don’t even fill ourselves. We exist in only a tiny corner of ourselves – we know, we remember how much we used to fill, but now we can see that our world has closed in on us and left us here.

I count myself lucky, blessed and privileged to only find my walls closing in for a week or two, here or there. At least these days. Maybe it happened more in the past – it’s hard to tell. And I know that for many this feeling is a far more regular occurrence.

Often these pieces of writing I create, as they emerge, end with something positive, a break, a question to guide us on. Sometimes it comes from my mind, sometimes from my heart, sometimes it emerges as I write, from somewhere higher or deeper. I’m not sure that’s going to happen today.

The truth is, sometimes our worlds just close in on us. It’s so hard. It’s hard for us, it’s hard for our loved ones, it’s hard for or lives and our work.

Perhaps it is going to happen today. Because as I sit here, two things come to me. Perhaps the answer to this contraction of our world comes from two places.

Perhaps the answer comes from curiosity: from understanding and an opening.

Perhaps the answer comes from connection: from love and understanding from another being.

Perhaps those are our weapons – for our loved ones and ourselves – on those weeks, months or years when it feels like the world is closing in around us. Perhaps we won't always win that fight. But we need to try.

So bring them with you, to your friends and your family, to the strangers you meet in a coffee shop and a street. Bring them to yourself.