• Town Talk

Ah, to trip the light fantastic! But what does that actually mean? Does it involve ingesting hallucinogens, as if the EMTs were standing by with the remedial dose of Thorazine? Happily not; what my prescription for urban anxiety involves is, as the old song goes, to merely cast your fate to the wind.

On a recent day, I took note of the fact that I had a few bucks (not that many) and a free day ahead of me. Just as it has been lately, the weather was a perfect 72 degrees with sunshine and a mild breeze blowing. All that stood between nirvana and me was my own reluctance to take a step in a fresh direction.

 Planting myself at an RTD stop, I sat and waited for the next No. 10, with, as Chuck Berry put it, “no particular place to go.” So many thousands of times in the past when I had had a specific time and destination in mind I experienced stress, wondering just when that damn thing would arrive.

 But on the day I mention, I gave myself permission to let it roll and just float downstream. At Colfax and Broadway, I transferred from the No. 10 to the No. 0 bus, which took me eventually to the Englewood Civic Center. When I got off the bus, I pondered my next direction. As it happened, I needed to make a pit stop at the Englewood Public Library to fill my water bottle and so forth.

 With that accomplished, I waited out a brief summer rain shower underneath a canopy by the library. Then, while seeking a Light Rail C train to Union Station, I decided instead to board the D train headed south for Littleton. Once I got to the stop — noticing that the rain was beginning to get more serious — I executed a 360-degree turn and got back on the D train.

 A Wackenhut RTD officer in his Barney Fife uniform boarded the northbound D train and I prayed my transfer would be adequate fare, should he shake me down. As it happened, he merely saw me looking at the information on the ticket machine once we were back at the Englewood Civic Center station and asked me if he could help me. I thanked him but declined his offer.

I went down the stairs and paid a fresh fare to take the No. 12 bus back to Capitol Hill. That particular bus took me through South Denver via South Pearl Street with all its gentrified glory. Finally, I disembarked at 9th and Corona, in good shape to stop in at King Soopers’ on my way home.

Winging it

The end result, and the point of my travelogue, is that there comes a time when we do very well to let go of our cares and troubles and just wing it. A science writer named Robin Nixon, writing for “Live Science,” says, “modern life can make people crazy.” She says that our contemporary culture features an environment that “continually activates the brain’s stress response.”

“Certain circuits in the brain,” writes Ms. Nixon, “react to stress as if it were an infection, triggering social withdrawal. The concomitant inflammation of this reaction potentially leads to brain damage in [certain well-documented parts of] the brain like the hippocampus, the frontal cortex and the basal ganglia.”

“In short bouts,” Nixon writes, “this inflammation is the body’s way of protecting itself. If prolonged, [the inflammation] takes a tremendous toll with mental illness such as schizophrenia, depression, autism, anxiety and bipolar disorder. All of these have been linked to inflammation. “

“The prevalence of these illnesses,” she concludes, “has increased in lockstep with modernization.” We have, then, created a living hell for ourselves and wonder why our mental health complaints have expanded to the point that virtually every day brings fresh evidence of someone going postal someplace. 

We crowd ourselves together in cities and force ourselves and each other to race against deadlines. The stress of urban anxiety is a completely natural outcome of our inhumanity to our own selves. My prescription for this disease is, as I have just spelled out, taking an occasional day to just be carried along with the breeze, taking in everything but not getting snagged on anything. 

I don’t imagine that my remedy will put any psychiatrists or pharmaceutical companies out of business, but I am quite certain that my own state of mind has improved for having done what I did, just on the spur of the moment. And, to me, spontaneity is the key. Grab your water bottle and just go!

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