Worries

In my life I have worried a lot.  As a veteran worrier, I will remind you of this bland and blunt truth. Much of our worry is a worrisome waste of time. 

Not in the sense that you shouldn’t have worried. You should and are strongly encouraged to. How uneventful and boring would our days be without trembling over this or that tiniest trifle, some petty possibility of a disturbance. A life without worry is not worth living — it is a life spent in undignified blindness and delusion, propelled by false thinking that nothing will go wrong, which it will. But if only one had the prescience to worry about the right things! And if one could know what the rights things to worry about are! 

Looking back on the big worries of my little life, I gleefully admit I was wrongly worried most of the time. 

Here are the big blundering worries of my young life.

As a child, I had a big worry that my father would die young and that I would remain an orphan. It was terrible to be one, ten million times worse than being an unplanned victim of some divorced parenthood, as some of my friends were! I cannot tell you how many of my innocent days were wasted crying over this much misanticipated misfortune. But the lucky truth is that at 92, my nimble father is still alive and looks like a good chance for 100. I am getting older now, and sometimes worry if my father worries if I will live long enough to witness his death. 

In my early adolescence, I was plagued by the worry that I would battle infertility issues and would never have a child. How sad it was to spend an entire life barren and progenyless! The truth is I got pregnant on the very first try (and each subsequent one). I got pregnant even when I didn’t try. That’s how sterile my fear of sterility was.

As a prolific worrier, over years I have worried about many a chronic uncommon illness and an acute common one. In my mind I survived, but never contracted, lupus and lyme disease, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, mononucleosis, vitiligo, appendicitis, acute bronchitis,  chronic cystitis, and so on. (In reality, I only ever suffered from minor allergies and chronic cellulitis.) Over years, many of my day was spoiled in an unnecessary worry about most types of cancer, asthma, rheumatism, mumps, multiple sclerosis, lockjaw, prosopagnosia, dystonia, rheumatism, dementia, arthritis, labyrinthitis, alien hand syndrome, etc. At one pint, out of boredom and in a bid for more efficacy, I even elevated my phobias to a meta level: I developed phobophobia and started fearing fear itself. Ultra self-referential and meta weird, I agree. 

It is not that an overlap between worry and reality is impossible. On rare occasions, if you are very unlucky, your worry may materialize, but regard it as a fluke and a coincidence, not a consequence of your worried wisdom or wise worriedness.

Worry is a lack of imagination. Or its limitation. It’s a chronic wrong-way-of-relating-to- the-world disorder. You think you are clever enough to foresee the ways reality will unroll, whereas in reality, reality is on top of you, preparing you unpleasantries from unforeseen corners -- when and where you least expect them. Reality is slyer than you, or me, or they, or anyone anywhere.  

So, how to live worryingly in truth and dignity? Is there such a thing as an enlightened worry?

My own advice, which I myself would never follow, is this. Life plays games on us, but rather than folding on its bluffs or trying to predict them, we should calmly wait for reality to reveal itself and open its cards. Never give up worry, but wait it out and worry only after the fact, in retrospect, when it’s already too late and all worry is pointless.