Why worry is good for nothing
From Ptypeswiki
Thoughts by John Eben Field
Worry, worry, worry. I am not free from anxiety and worry, not even in the slightest, but I am realizing that there is no such thing as productive worrying. In the past, and some of that is the very recent past, I have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about things that I had no control over. I would find myself, again and again, stuck in a cycle where I was paralyzed with worry about things over which I could exercise no influence. These things which filled me with worry were inevitable. Precisely because they were inevitable is what caused me to worry about them. If there was a way of getting out of them, I would have pursued that path with all my strength and vigour, but the fact of the matter was that they were necessary. In the end, what it came down to was that I had chosen to put these obstacles, tasks, challenges in my path and I knew that, because I had done so, it was required for me to follow through and pass into them. But this did not stop me from worrying. The worrying, though, did nothing to change the tone of these events, except perhaps to cause me to lose a little sleep. I was overwhelmed by the necessity of doing the very things which I had chosen to do. So if worrying does amount to a lot of stress and anxiety about things we cannot change, a good question to ask is, "Why do we do it?" I think the answer probably has a lot to do with our biological heredity, but I also believe there is a specifically psychological component which requires attention. We worry not so much because we can, but because we need to. In some way, worrying allows us to focus on a task that is difficult. Now, I do firmly believe that the instinctive reaction of worry to stressful future events is a question of need, or, to be more precise, of the necessity of passing the present in relation to a terrorizing future. We are terrified of the future because we cannot know with certainty how the events of that future will play out in the course of our lives. Now, finally, we can begin to see why worrying is in fact unnecessary. If we simply rest assured in our present, if we simply come to be as we are when we are, if we simply know that we will be, then, perhaps, we can defuse some of the explosiveness of the necessity of worrying about the future. Perhaps if we could simply pass the present as a way of existence, as a way of being, without focusing so much of our energy toward those things which are not yet present, then we could find a way of existing merely because we are as we are. If worrying is good for nothing, then it seems to me that we are expending radical amounts of energy on a process which produces nothing of merit or worth. We should direct more of our attention toward what we are doing while we are doing it, instead of focusing on those things which, because they are in the future, can exist as nothing more than a shadowland in the night.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 License. It uses material from the Ebb and Flow article "A Meditation: Why worrying is good for nothing". (see Copyrights for details).
