Anxiety as an invitation to grow

When I was around the age of 24 I started reading everything by the Danish, existential philosopher and Christian theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. And it didn’t take long to discover that I was quickly in over my head intellectually. To help acclimatize myself to his writing I found myself reading Kierkegaard for Beginners (i.e. think comic style book) while also reading his seminal work, Fear and Trembling.

Though it appears in another work (The Concept of Anxiety), I was introduced in the beginners book to the infamous quote of Kierkegaard regarding anxiety.

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye, as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness.”

What seared itself in my conscious at that time was that in my own anxiety was freedom. Freedom to do something different than live in worry and panic. And in that moment (or in a lot of successive moments in my reading) I came to realize and formulate this idea that “anxiety is an opportunity for growth”.

It was, and is this belief, that anxiety is simply the internal signal within us saying, “pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.” And when I started to pay attention to my anxiety I realized that freedom was afoot.

Even my first book on anxiety, The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?, is a signal to anyone who is willing to listen, that our anxiety is an invitation to grow.

Have you listened to your anxiety? Can you hear an invitation to grow?