You Don’t Know Enough To Worry

Really, you don’t.

It keeps impressing me that whenever I feel anxious about anything, the best advice I could heed is to “stop worrying”. It’s also some of the hardest advice to follow through on—how dare you tell a mind to stop worrying; worrying is what the mind does best.

Worry is not love, but rather a manifestation of what the mind thinks might be or could be love. Worrying masquerades as protection; a feeble attempt to try and defend against the uncontrollable or the unknowable. If only we could worry ourselves into certainty; if only we could loosen our grip on worrying.

Noticing where our minds go to worry can show us what we care about; alternatively, noticing what we worry about can reveal how much time we spend thinking about what we don’t care about. The clothes we don’t have, or the traffic that might be bad later, or the potential uncomfortable conversation we might encounter…how much precious energy do we squander, worrying about what does or doesn’t matter? Beyond the illusion of security, I’m not sure that worrying serves a purpose. The more I look at it, the more it seems a waste of time, a futile effort.

Here’s a perspective that works to ease my worried mind: we don’t actually know enough to need to worry. Unless we know the future, which we don’t, there isn’t a way to tell when we should be worried about what’s coming (or not). Most of the time, we really don’t have enough information to know if we should be worried. So why bother? If there is, in fact, something concerning lying ahead—which there is certainly bound to be—we can deal with it when it arrives.

If this sounds like a naïve perspective, it could be. It may also be a perspective that when applied, really helps.

. .

To the extent that in this given moment, you are able to watch the mind instead of being swept up in its drama, you do have some power to slow the worrying. If you can witness the thoughts your mind is generating, you can exert some intention toward shifting those thoughts and replacing them with different ones. This is how any kind of behavior change happens: once you become aware of what you want to change, you have some agency to work with it. Awareness creates agency.

In this given moment, there is nothing to worry about, because in this moment resides neither the future nor the past. The more you can dwell here now, the less you think you need to worry about anywhere else.

Whether it’s about your family or your health or what might happen during the holidays this year—stop worrying. You don’t really know enough to need to worry about it, anyways.

Maggie