about worrying

Let's talk about worrying. Let's talk about its pros and its cons. Frankly, I can't think of any pros, but that's because I'm very aware of the cons. The point of this inquiry is to make you aware of the cons also. Then you can reassess the pros, and truly benefit from them.

The big down side of worrying is that while you're doing it you have to be worried. Your garden variety worrier is very good at dismissing this fact as a truism. That kind of dismissal is the same as saying the point is so true that it no longer bears any significance. Huh?

I'd like to suggest it does bear significance. If you have a tendency to worry, or you worry much at all, you are losing that many hours of your life to that state of being. Imagine you could see your entire life as a pie chart and worry figures in as a big, greedy slice.

The other slices are fun, love, work, play, and whatever else you are up to in this brief affair we call living. But there's the worry slice bullying all the others to the side. Each one of them shrinks as the worry slice grows. That's how the pie chart and your life works.

The pie chart metaphor is handy because it shows us where our values are. We might pay a lot of lip service to our preferred values, and wish to embody them, but our actual values, the ones we devoted real time to over the years, are the pie's biggest slices.

That's hard news. That's tough love. We have to look at our actions and see they are the only actual expression of our values. We have to admit that all the rest is talk. Talk-ity talk. Blah blah blah. Yap yap yap. I love you. I didn't mean to. Et cetera.

Worrying is not only talk. Worrying is primarily action. When you worry, you have to spend your time at it. You devote your time to it. You invest in it. You bake up that pie of your life and make worrying a bigger and bigger slice with each episode.

The psychological meaning of these reminders is that the more you worry, the more time of your life you give over to states of stress and darkness. You actually dwell in unhappiness in order to worry. Does that sound like a fair trade to you?

When life asks you if you'd like to be happy or worry, which one do you choose? It's that simple. You can tell yourself you are worrying in order to be happy, but the plain fact is you are worrying and therefore you are not happy. Period.

It's a question of living in the present or the future. Which one is more real? If you think the future is more real, you'll squander your happiness in the present for it. If you think the present is more real, you won't. Truism: the present is more real.

The present is the only thing that's ever real. It's always been the present and always will. Your whole life happens in the present and nowhere else. It's the same for all life. That's what makes it a truism. But significant as hell for being happy.

Let's face it. All the things we are trying to control by worrying about the future are really peanuts compared to the things we can't control. We want to be safe, comfortable, healthy, warm, what have you, and death comes for us regardless.

Be those things now. They're available to you if you stop worrying about them. And they won't be in the future if you don't stop worrying about them. When you get there, when the future comes, any unresolved habit of worrying will continue.

Can't you see it? People spend their whole lives worried about something, believing this and that something needs to occur, and the habit of living that way in the present, always fixated on the future, dominates that future when it finally arrives.

We get where we thought we were trying to and we don't enjoy it at all. Why? Because the main relationship we developed toward the present experience of living is to disregard the present experience of living out of concern for the future.

How can that relationship to the present possibly change overnight when we get where we thought we were going? It can't. It won't. You're lying to yourself if you disagree. Don't put an emphasis on future circumstances. Emphasize the gift of now.

When you emphasize the gift of now, you discover an unexpected secret about it: it likes to take care of you. If you really dwell there, in the present experience of your life, although now and again you will face hard things, life will also provide for you.

That's the unexpected secret. That's what worry can't see. Life will take care of you, in many cases better than you can by worrying, if only you trust it to. Plus, you get the brilliant perk from that approach that trust is your regular state of being.

I dare say, that regular state of being actually creates the trustworthy outcome . I dare say, the worried state of being creates the worrisome outcome. It's all, in great measure, self-fulfilling prophecy. That sounds like mysticism, which isn't a dirty word.

The mystical truth is the plain truth. The plainest truth of all is the most mystical truth. The truism is a great mystical revelation. Learn to heed it. If you worry, you're worried, and you'll prove that you should have been. You prove what you want to.

If you want to prove you can trust, you will. You can. Set out to prove it and it will come true simply from your devotion to it. Then all the things you used to worry about will become needless on the one hand and sound comic planning on the other.