I don't want to be a rock

Wow. Excerpt from a book a friend gave me on Anxiety by Dr. Paul Dobransky.

Biologists have an answer. They say that "life is irritable". A living thing is defined as a being that is hit by the environment’s stress, and then makes a purposeful response to that stress. This implies that a decision has been made. Therefore, the only thing that all living things have in common is that they make decisions.

Even a tree makes a crude kind of decision in response to the environment—its branches grow toward sunlight, NOT toward shade. A frog makes a decision to hop away from a predator. But rocks do not make decisions. When stressed by the environment, they only sit there. Rocks are by definition not alive, a fact which struck me.

...

...in all we do, including what we do about our anxieties and panic, there are only three potential routes: be passive, be destructive, or be constructive. Since being passive is being a little less than alive [like the rock], and being active means being “more alive,” this meant that whether we make a mistake with our decisions or not, we are still more alive for making them. I could wrap my mind around that. It meant that ANY decision is better than NO decision about a fear we have, including the fear of having another panic episode. My procrastination was fixed. My hesitance about changing was fixed. My fear of taking action because I might not pick the right action was fixed – my perfectionism was lessened, and with it, my stress.