Edgar Allan Poe was a writer best known for his poetry. In his short story “The Premature Burial” tells a story of a man with a cataleptic disorder.
Cataleptic disorder is a medical condition characterized by a trance or seizure with a loss of sensation and consciousness. Some would stay in this trance state for days, to weeks.
And back then they would prematurely bury the people who would go into this trance because medical tests failed to establish distinction between the state of the trance and death.
Edgar Allen Poe tells a story about a man with cataleptic disorder who had a constant fear of being buried alive.
In a part of the story the man wakes up from one of these trances and finds himself not being able to speak or barely move. Poe does a fantastic job of expressing the characters feelings as he wakes up and slowly starts to remember his disease and then finds himself smelling the moist earth. The character starts to panic thinking that he was buried prematurely, living out his greatest fear. He struggled to scream and when he was finally able to, others responded, which confused him. Because how could others respond if he was buried. His memory then came back and he realized that he was on a ship. What he felt like a coffin was actually the small cabin he was in aboard the ship.
After the character experiences this he goes on and rejects his old fears, he starts going outside, which he wouldn’t even risk doing when he feared his condition because if he fell into one of his trances around someone who didn’t know he had the disorder, they would assume he was dead. But after seeing that his fear had consumed his life, he started to think about other things than his death. He completely ended all his thoughts of live burial.
As Poe states in the short story “i dismissed forever my apprehensions of live burial, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence then the cause”
And he never experienced the trances again.
I chose to speak about Poe’s story “The Premature Burial” because I found it to have a very profound meaning. It helps explain that when you are set on one outcome, good or bad, that outcome will most likely happen. For example if you fear not succeeding. Then, you will be so focused on that fear that it will become the focal point of your life. When something becomes a focal point, it is the center. Meaning, if not succeeding is the center of your life, what is the most likely outcome? Not succeeding. Because when you consistently focus on something you will create it. Your brain always seeks to bring you what you focus on and it does not know the difference between good and bad.
Your focus then becomes your reality.
In the story, the man consistently thought about his fear of death and so he ended up creating a life based around that fear. Until one day he realized he wasn’t living the life he wanted to live. Until he changed his focus and began to ponder life instead of death, was when he started to live. He changed his focus which changed his reality.
Our focus, where we place our attention, is where we place our energy. And where we place our energy is where we are placing our life force, giving life to whatever our attention is on. No matter how big or how small, good or bad, we bring it to life. So that begs the question, what are we consistently focusing on in our daily lives?
We are all guilty of focusing heavily on our problems thinking that if we do then somehow that gives us control over them. But it is quite the opposite, we are giving up control to our problems the more we choose to focus on them. But if we would just look at a problem for what it is and not make it any bigger than it is in our heads, we would see that every problem has a solution. And every problem is challenging you to grow, to expand so that you can take on more than you could before. Problems are our biggest allies, our biggest teachers, but only if we let them.
So I invite you to do this with me, let’s turn our problems into projects and see every one of them as an opportunity for something new to emerge in us, to show us that we can do more than we possibly could have ever imagined. Let’s have some fun with it, because hey, there’s always going to be problems thrown at us in life, so we might as well enjoy the ride while we can.
Until next time friend,
Camila Tracanelli
Also, if anyone is interested in reading the short story, it can be found by using the link below.
