Observing Intensities

   Intense emotions such as fear or desire can seem like they last forever or even dominate a person's life. However, I have found that such experiences are short lived and are based on circumstances that are themselves impermanent.
  I find that with anxiety in particular, I am at a loss, because anxiety tends to lead to racing thoughts. Sometimes it's a bit like looking at a cloud chamber and seeing all these streaks and swirls on a blank surface. If I am attentive to the whole experience, I find that the panic is often based on lacking sufficient information on how to fully handle the situation. Maybe I am able to face the situation but I haven't accepted it fully because the pieces in the puzzle just aren't there. In those cases, I need to tell myself that there's nothing wrong with "me", only that I am being given a partial view which is incomplete. I can only work with what I know to make the picture more unified later on.
    Desire may look like wanting to complete something, but what if it were wanting to avoid the suffering of "not having"? If one could allow that suffering of not having to arise instead of trying desperately to complete the picture of desire, then the desire itself abates. I think it's because desire is seen for what it really is, and it's no longer so desirable.
   These two emotions, anxiety and desire, are often very intense. Intensity has a way of clouding the mind and making a person forget the whole picture (see Spinoza). It's no wonder that people often do rash things when they're in the state of these emotions. They are only looking at a tiny fraction of the whole experience of life, like looking at a tiny thread in an enormous tapestry. If a person allows the pain of these two emotions to take their course without searching frantically for a solution, they might tend to make better decisions, because the solution will come later on, when the mind is calm and clear.