'Falling, falling, without limits'
You know how a word lodges itself in your mind and intrigues you, and sounds itself over and over until it doesn’t sound like a real wordany more?
Panic: a sudden strong feeling of anxiety or fear that prevents reasonable
thought and action. (OED)
Oh I know the biological explanations, the chemical reasons and the evolutionary accounts, but isn’t it an extraordinary thing? That out of nowhere, all at once something can make you freeze, make time stop, steal your breath and cut through all your thoughts and feelings like a knife? Just like that.
I see it like a white dagger, or a lightning bolt that strikes diagonally, causing a momentary freeze frame that slows down time and sharpens the senses for a fragment of a second before vanishing into nothing and allowing the scene to jerk back into motion again, the same but all changed.
And then the reiterated slogan... ‘Don’t panic!’ Anaesthetize yourself, numb your responses; don’t react too violently, let a flash of a situation knife you into fear. Every where it is slapped up on pasteboard with a nice yellow smiley face.
Don’t panic! Don’t worry. Relax. Take it easy.
A slow progression into numbness like the gentle slipping into a swimming pool.
