Month: October 2019

Judy stood at the sink cutting open a melon. “Hope this turns out to be ripe.”  She tasted it. “Oh good,” she said.

“So, it turned out to be tasty and ripe, despite your worry?” I asked.

“I worry each time I cut into a melon,” she replied. “You never know what you are going to get.”

“So, you are paraphrasing Forrest Gump now?

“Well, he was right,” she replied. “You never know.”

Dia de Los Muertos comes around again next week. The living visit the dead with food and dance, a party to assure the dead that they are not forgotten. The dead dance, too, light on their spiritual feet because they have no worries.  For the time of the celebration neither do the living.

If all we had to worry about was the ripeness of a melon, we might dance more. But, “you never know” becomes, for some people, an invitation to worry despite the wisdom of some wise people.

The Dalai Lama, for example, once wrote, “If a problem is fixable, if a situation is something that you can do something about, then there is no need to worry. If it is not fixable, then there is no helping worrying.”  A chronic worrier would worry about how to decide what is fixable.

Winston Churchill quoted Mark Twain who paraphrased Rene Montaigne who probably quoted an ancient Roman like Cicero: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles but most of them never happened.”

Robert Frost observed, “the reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry that work.” He must have written that after he had made money selling his books of poetry.

In his Gospel, Matthew asked, in the famous section about the lilies of the field, “who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”

The wisdom of the sages notwithstanding, I’m not sure that anyone prone to worry can stop worrying.  And I confess, as a self-described non-worrier, that I have lost sleep some nights to worry (which I call anticipatory consideration of alternatives).

Worry made an appearance in two songs popular when we were growing up. “It Takes a Worried Man,” sang The Kingston Trio, covering a country song from an earlier day.  People of a Certain Age, do you know the object of the worry about which they sang? Two guys were sweet on the same girl. One was with the girl as the other, unaware of the competition, knocked on her door.

The Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” comforted a girl whose boyfriend had bragged about how fast his car could go and was now called out to prove it to the other guys.

I suspect neither situation has cropped up for you recently. Perhaps it never did when you were a teen.  Both songs illustrate, though, what is now routinely called teen angst.

Ripeness, dating competition, bragging about your fast car; how trivial these seem when compared to, say a job in jeopardy, putting at risk your family’s security, a deteriorating neighborhood becoming increasingly unsafe for kids’ play, or a health issue with an uncertain outcome. 

Forrest Gump and Judy nailed it: “You never know.”

Is there, then, a sanctuary for worriers?

I have two suggestions. Whenever one is engaged in doing a kindness for another, that action tends to divert one’s attention.  Losing oneself in the service of others can crowd out worry from one’s mind space.

Serving others takes time that is then no longer available to be wasted on worry.

Secondly, we can learn from the rituals of the Dia de Los Muertos.  We can share our burdens with family and/or other who care about us.  A burden shared is a burden lightened.

People of faith can, in Martin Luther’s words, “pray and let God worry,” another form of burden sharing. Jesus was explicit. “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Brian Blessed wrote “95% of the things we worry about in life never actually happen but that’s the human brain for you. It can help us do all kinds of wonderful things but can also be an absolute nightmare.”

Perhaps worry is inescapable—Blessed’s 5% will always be there. “You never know” really is an ever-present possibility.

However, think on this: Isn’t being the other person to whom someone turns to share a burden a high compliment? Haven’t we all experienced that moment after we have shared something burdensome with a family member or friend best described by “I’m glad I finally got that off my chest?” Perhaps, the best sanctuary is us for each other.

Judy is fond of a quote attributed to Will Rogers: “Worry works. 90% of what I worry about never happens.” And when something you worried about doesn’t turn out badly, is there a sense of relief, an actual good feeling?

What if we began to view worry as a price of caring? Maybe, then, we could stop worrying so much about worrying and just get on with living. Because you just never know.

Daniel E. White

October 24, 2019

I went for a morning walk.  Morning walks for us are more unusual than they should be.  But we usually end up meeting demands of the day and those impede what we ought to be doing for our health. Even retired people feel like we have demands that often crowd out morning walks.

I was by myself because Judy had business from the previous evening’s Rotary meeting to handle, and the humidity was well past her tolerance.  I was dripping wet when I got back from a mere 1.5 mile walk so her decision to forego the walk was validated.

We drive the stretch of Makakilo Drive where I walk frequently. Driving, we miss things. We miss saying hello to other walkers, of which there were two main types that morning: people my age and older and moms pushing strollers. One of the moms was a former IPA teacher.  Another stroller-pusher was a tutu wahine, a grandmother with whom I shared a one-sentence exchange beyond hello.

That day, I saw a dove limping across the sidewalk and expressed my sympathy for its hurt paw. I saw myna birds atop every one of the light poles, not quite as grand as the red-tailed hawks in California who behave the same way but obviously clued into the advantages of a high perch.

I passed a Filipino woman sweeping leaves from the dirt patch that was her parking strip with a homemade broom and a muscular Hawaiian man putting brake fluid—or maybe it was transmission—into the engine compartment of his muscle truck. In sort, because I was walking, I saw bits of everyday life on Makakilo Drive that I do not see at 40 mph.

In the August 2019 Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch has a piece called “Wait a Minute.” His lede is the graphic video streaming the Christchurch, New Zealand murders and how, despite quick action by the CEO of You Tube to take down the video, millions still saw the carnage as it was accumulating.

Rauch posits that, had there not been the modern-day craving for instantaneous communication, the public good of blocking any showing of the video could have been achieved. His article describes similar situations where the virtue of delay, the rejection of “instantaneous-ism” ought to be considered.

Rauch writes “…as everyone’s mom used to put it, ‘when you’re mad, count to ten before you answer’” as he describes the two cognitive systems identified by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is “intuitive, automatic, and impulsive.” System 2 is slower, “gathers facts, consults evidence….” Those moms were banking on a ten count getting us from System 1 to System 2.

Rauch notes that Kahneman said we need both systems. There is nothing inherently wrong about intuition, automaticity or impulse. On that morning walk, I was in the crosswalk as a truck, traveling the speed limit, rounded the curve, seeing me only nanoseconds before his truck and I would be trying to occupy the same space. I did not have to think about moving quickly.

I also have a vivid memory of a day 35 years ago when, in the heat of a baseball game in which I was coaching, I yelled something at the umpire that, to my chagrin, could have been heard a mile away.  Instantly, I wanted to grab back all those words, like erasing a cartoon bubble filled with ungentlemanly words. I had failed to count to ten.

People of a Certain Age, one of the blessings of retirement, if we choose to use it, is the time to be more reflective about what we do and say. There is time available to walk the Drive, not just drive the walk.

Another friend wrote recently while on his vacation.  He said that email followed him whether he was at work or not.

When our primary way to message each other was with pen and paper, time got used up. It took some time to write, more time to post the letter and time in transit to the destination where the letter might actually sit unopened until the vacation was over.  Now we have Smartphones.

These mean that the message is delivered as soon as it is sent. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, What’s App; these are merely variations on the phenomenon of making one person’s thoughts instantaneously available to another.

Rauch observes that history books are replete with stories about letters written in anger and then not sent. The writer had counted to ten. What if we all counted to ten before hitting “send?”

I pointed out to my friend that phones and computers are still under our control in a very important sense. Neither works unless we turn them on.

It is not rocket science or a new thought that our human capacities have not kept pace with our technological know-how or the explosion of the number of knowable things.  Perhaps our “age of anxiety,” if we are in one, is induced, in part, by a sense that we can’t keep up.  We can, however, choose which machines to turn on when. We can take walks, count to ten, smell the roses, as it were.

The best pitchers in baseball mix their pitches, fast, slow, faster, slower.  There is room in life for fast and slow. Maybe the challenge these days is to ensure space for slow.

Daniel E. White

October 14, 2019