My doctor asked if there was anything that bothered me on a daily basis. Habits, she suggested, or small annoyances.

This was an easy one. “People talking with food in their mouth. Or chewing with their mouth open.”

“How do you feel?”

And this is true. “Like my chest hurts and if they don’t stop–and sometimes even after they do–I’m going to throw up or collapse with a seizure.”

I suggested I overreact and I know that. She said no. “You have misophonia.” I “feel anger, disgust and a desire to flee” when I hear certain sounds.

Last week she suggested that for several years beginning about 2017 I had suffered from a form of cognitive dissonance. I asked her to explain it and she tried, she really did, but then I remembered Google. It turns out everyone experiences it; we call it “stress.” But some people—a minuscule percentage, which apparently includes sixty-three-year-old white writers from New York who live in Virginia, have trouble listening to the news, dealing with hostile people, understanding conflict to the point that the stress (dissonance) can be intolerable. It’s not simply that the way things are contradict how they should or can be; it’s that some minds can’t tolerate that often serious digression from what should be normal. Think of turning on the radio and the music is all off key, and everyone else ignores it or tunes it out, but you feel it in your bones so that your skull starts to crack. That. It’s when the solution to a problem that anyone else would either figure out quickly or abandon and move on leaves you so confused that a complete mental breakdown is entirely likely.

It’s when your actions do not coincide with your beliefs or strong desires because of some lack of information, pressure from others, whatever, and instead of being mindful, instead of having enough self-awareness to reconcile those differences by not rationalizing your way out of your beliefs or desires, you live with absolute anxiety and disarray, psychologically, of course, but also physically as it can manifest as high blood pressure, lightheadedness, or rapid heart rate, and often it is set off by some event or occurrence slamming you off track like a landslide taking out a passing train. The causes are simple: severe and sudden change of direction in life either through leaving a job, losing everything, or some form of physical or mental attack that seems to never end.

So while it is not uncommon to not want war (everyone wishes for peace and can’t tolerate war), it is an entirely different level if your mind cannot comprehend the very existence of war, the very notion of hurting others for some gain, and even for self-preservation, makes your mind freeze and your heart race; and the news reports are the adult equivalent of some childhood bully yelling in your face in some foreign language. You cannot for the life of you understand how it is that war leaked into the pool of peace and watching or hearing about it causes a racing heart, drastically increased blood pressure, and irritability. So if the conflict is personal, confusion is even more common, and you might very likely abandon critical thinking skills entirely making a difficult situation–whether it be in relationships, finances, or even employment–tragically worse. And if one must deal with all three, jumping off a cliff is not off the table.

So when two seemingly opposing forces attempt to exist in the same space, or even attempt to conquer each other, it can be damn near suicidal to tolerate for someone suffering from cognitive dissonance.

I think I explained that better than the doctor. Just saying.

There is a way out of it besides suddenly or even gradually becoming completely mindful and self-aware, as if you can buy a gallon of that with a yoga mat and stretch pants.

So I asked the doctor just that, and her reply was this: “Do you spend any time in nature?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“Not enough.”

“I live in a jungle near water. It’s pretty enough.”

Not anymore, she said.

Here’s why nature: Nature, it seems, does not contradict our expectations of its actions since it always has and always will be in and of itself its own source and recipient. We are not in charge and when we try to be we eventually lose.

Check out the blade of grass coming up through the sidewalk.

This isn’t OCD. And it isn’t in a person’s control without first having some sense of absolute awareness that it exists at all. In other words, you have to know you have some form of cognitive dissonance before you can avoid (not cure) it to begin with. Not an easy task. Otherwise, one can continue to come across to others as mentally disheveled, dependent, bothersome, irrational. Some of you who know someone like this know well exactly what I mean.

Here’s the bizarre thing: My favorite class to teach is critical thinking wherein we must examine all the sources of a particular argument, vet them for expertise and accuracy, examine as many sides of the argument as seem legitimate, and come to some conclusion based upon rational thought and an absence of fallacies. No wonder I enjoy it; it’s a course with a primary objective of eliminating dissonance from an argument. Boom.

So today after my nature walk, I made a list of opposites. Please don’t comment that some of these are not, in the Webster sense of things, actually opposite. I know that. But they play out as opposing forces in some way. You can make your own list as you’ll see in a minute:  

War/Peace

Israel/Gaza

Russia/Ukraine

Republicans/Democrats

Vanilla/Chocolate

Trump/Biden

Cain/Abel

Frazier/Ali

Fires/Floods

Smalls/Shakur

York/Lancaster

Grudge/Forgiveness

Torrents/Drought

Yankees/Mets

Hamilton/Burr

Addiction/Pain

Manic/Depression

China/Thailand

Android/Apple

Elizabeth/Mary Queen of Scots

War/Peace

Batman/Superman

Brexit/EU

Jobs/Gates

Brady/Montana

Army/Navy

Public/Private

Imperial/Metric

Crawford/Davis

North/South

Permission/Forgiveness

Harding/Kerrigan

Winter/Summer

Byron/Keats

Hot/Cold

War/Peace

Heaven/Hell

Give/Take

Hatfields/McCoys

Here/There

Stay/Go

Live/Die

Attract/Repel

Edison/Tesla

Opposite/Same

Jefferson/Adams

War/Peace

Now/Forever

Okay, you get the point. But next we must do what is infinitely more difficult: Make the personal list, the opposites “within” which battle or have battled so deep in our psyche they rattle our very notion of our purpose in life. This list of “opposites” might not appear to be so contradictory but merely choices. But our lives are set up to label the path not taken as “opposite” of where we went, not because of coordinates but the “one or the other” significance of choice.

New York/Virginia

St. Bonaventure/Chapel Hill

Tucson/NYC

Austria/Pennsylvania

Log/Brick

Oysters/Clams

And then in recent years the list gets more specific for its sheer continuing presence. For instance:

No.

No, this list is mine. I am mindful enough to keep this to myself.

There are advantages of practicing mindfulness beyond not allowing the off-key aspects of life to make our blood curdle, not the least of which is a new sense of self-awareness. To look back now, for me anyway, over a few years when my cognitiveness was anything but harmonious, is to be flush with embarrassment at the choices I made, at the favors and requests I asked of others when needing help instead of figuring it out on my own. They were not conscious decisions; they were somehow self-embodied survivalisms that, if I had any presence of mind outside of the stress of dissonance, I never would have pursued. Ever.

So that list is mine to burn.

Or freeze.

Bury/Cremate

Rent/Own

Lease/Purchase

Chicken/Egg

Fiction/Non-fiction

Comedy/Drama

War/Peace

Peace.

Peace.