What was this worry, Ken?
Well, never you mind. This is a blog we’re running here, not a feckin’
confessional. Imagine a fairly substantial worry of your own and apply it here.
The effect will be much the same.
This worry was of a particular
nature where a moment of reckoning would inevitably come. A precise moment
where, once it came and went, the worry would either have blown up into a fully
formed difficulty or else it would have completely gone away in an instant,
evaporating into the ether. The build up to this zero-moment was understandably
twitchy. Would things be all right or would they not? Tick tock, tick tock. The
moment came, it held for a long, long moment… and then it passed. There was no
worry anymore. Everything in the garden was immediately rosy. All was well.
Phew. Time to celebrate.
Time to jump around a bit.
Well, you would think so,
wouldn’t you? You would expect that there would be a blissful lifting of
pressure and worry and random scenario-running and all that kind of stuff. But
that wasn’t really how it went.
What actually happened was
that my mind kind of said, “Right, that’s all over and done with now. What
shall I worry about next?” And a whole list of lesser things immediately presented
themselves to be worried about. The funny this is, if the big worry moment had
gone the other way, I wouldn’t have been giving any of these other things a
second thought. But there they were nonetheless, in the queue, waiting
patiently to be worried-about by me.
What’s that all about?
It wasn’t always the case,
at least I don’t think it was. There was a time where I could celebrate if a
cause for worry was suddenly lifted from me. I don’t necessarily mean I would fall
around the place hugging grannies and weeping for unmitigated joy. I just mean
there would be some tangible sense of relief or ease. In this case, the overriding
sensation was one of… nothing. The thing that had occupied most of my waking
moments – and quite a few of my sleeping ones – had vanished and yet I felt no
better off than I was before.
That’s this week’s post, in
a nutshell. I usually have some kind of a conclusion or, at least, a tidy little
round up on which to close the thing out. Not this time. At least, as I type
this word… no, I don’t know what the tidy conclusion might be. I’ll stop typing
for a moment and think about it. I’ll see if anything occurs…
… …
Nope. Not really.
Reading back, it sounds like
I’m in some sort of crisis or something but nothing could be further from the
truth. The worry was small enough, in retrospect at least. The relief when the worry finally went away was just surprisingly non-existent. That’s all. Perhaps it’s just an
age thing. Perhaps, the older we get, the fewer peaks and troughs we ride.
Maybe things just level out. Except that last trough seemed ‘trough-ey’ enough.
It’s the peaks that don’t quite peak like they should.
And then there’s another
thought. Maybe I’m just imagining it all. Don’t I feel a lot better now than I
did at the zenith of the worry. I believe I do. More relaxed, more at ease. So
fucking what if I didn’t throw a thanksgiving parade just because my stupid
little worry went away? Looking back, it probably didn’t even warrant a big
reaction. Things are grand again, isn’t that all that matters?
That’s it. This navel-gazing
has been brought to you by me. Have a lovely day.
And, if you should find that
a worry of yours suddenly goes away from you, try to have an even nicer one.
1 comment:
I used to worry a lot. I was always running the numbers and imagining all the ways things can go wrong and, as you will well know, there as SO MANY ways things can go wrong even if there only ever is one way in which they do and usually one you never imagined. But now it takes a lot to push me into an actual worry. (You're right, doesn't quite work.) It probably is an age thing or, more realistically, an experience thing. I've never found worrying helpful so why waste energy on it? I still live with a perpetual sense of impending doom (welcome to the 21st century) but it's a hazy doom I've learned to live with. In general I'm not a big fan of negative emotions. They don't seem to do much good, not in the grand scheme of things.
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