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