I just got back from climbing Mt. McKinley (Denali) in Alaska. Twenty days hauling an 80-lbs pack up steep traverses interspersed with hours on end languishing in a tent. Hard work mixed with sheer laziness.
It’s been a long time since I’ve slept for fourteen hours straight. Or stared off into space for an entire day while my mind roams the pampas. Not since Iran, when my only company was the baby. No one out of diapers to talk to until my husband came home. Nothing on TV until the stations turned on at 4PM. Back then I would remember, for lack of anything better to do, the most inconsequential things. The neighborhood I grew up in. The sound of Paddlefoot, an old Basset mix that lived three doors down, tipping over the metal garbage cans set out along our street. Mrs. Oeser clanging a dinner bell, the signal that it was time for her kids to come on home.
Off the mountain, my mind no longer drifts. It’s latched onto the hundreds of little worries and anxieties I could barely remember while in my tent.
Where will my son, a kid who moved out in a huff at 16, end up in this world? Will my Arabic-speaking daughter fall prey to Al-Qaeda and strap a car bomb to her chest? Will I ever finish my book? And what to do about the fleas? The poor dog is nearly bald now; he’ll likely drown himself in the pool.
The funny thing about inching up a slope with a heavy pack is that the mind stays locked in the moment. The effort is so great; the desire to quit so strong, that the only thing to do is focus on the rope, a red squiggly line meandering in the snow ahead. To tamp down the panic, that darty-eyed, horse-in-a- burning-barn feeling that arises when I falter,I count: 1,1,2,2,3,3, all the way to 100 and then start it up again.
Back home, however, my focus is all over the board. Staying in the moment is impossible. I would count away my building anxiety if it weren’t so damn ridiculous.
In my younger years, I never realized I was a worrier. I fancied myself one of those laid back sorts. A lot like Scarlet O’Hara. Problems were meant to be put off in the hope that, given enough time, they would all work out on their own.
About a dozen years ago I discovered the truth.
I was working as a salesperson at a local chemical company and was required to take a Dale Carnegie course as a way of improving my communication skills. Primarily known for its emphasis on public speaking, I took the course figuring I’d learn, at the very least, to give a rousing speech.
The first evening in, the fellow running the program handed out several books, one of them entitled, oddly, How To Stop Worrying And Start Living . What that had to do with public speaking, or me, I hadn’t a clue.
Bored one evening, the kids in bed, my husband glued to the TV, my mother long asleep, I decided to read the book. By chapter two, it became pretty clear to me that Dale Carnegie, way back in 1944, knew the score.
How had I not recognized this before? I wasn’t tough and headstrong like Scarlet; I was paralyzed by fear. I wasn’t dealing with my faltering marriage up front. I was clinging to status quo because I was afraid of the future. As Mom used to say, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
The low level anxiety I felt, seemingly as much a part of me as green eyes and blonde hair, came from pretending to myself that everything was A-OK. My trepidation about the future was nothing new. I’d come out of college looking for a man as my plan. I had no idea how else to get launched.
At my desk, a vat of chemicals bubbling at my back, I read the story of a man who learned to stop worrying about the future by watching a train engineer:
That engineer had given me the answer I had been seeking. He was starting out on that long journey with only one green light to go by. If I had been in his place, I would want to see all the green lights for the entire journey. Impossible, of course, yet that was exactly what I was trying to do with my life—sitting in the station, going noplace, because I was trying too hard to see what was ahead of me….That engineer didn’t worry about trouble that he might encounter miles ahead. There probably would be some delays, some slowdowns, but wasn’t that why they had signal systems?…. the trip through life is so much easier without the worry of what color the next light will be. No matter what color it may be, I will know what to do.
The story caught me so off guard that for several weeks I refused to read any more. The book sat on my desk atop customer files and a sheaf of yellow-lined paper. Only after an argument with my husband one weekend did I dare to read on:
As the years went by, I gradually discovered that ninety-nine per cent of the things I worried about never happened….You and I could probably eliminate nine tenths of our worries right now if we would cease our fretting long enough to discover whether, by the law of averages, there was any real justification for our worries…It has been said that nearly all of our worries and unhappiness come from our imagination and not from reality.
I took out a pen and wrote my worries down. At the top of the page I scribbled, If I Leave My Marriage. There were 10 items on the list, starting with my husband kidnapping the kids and taking them to Iran. Hardly likely, but there it was.
And when I got the nerve up to ask for a divorce, when I understood that no one can see down the tracks, that the lights will appear and tell me what to do, I came to discover that, out of all the possible outcomes I had fretted over, only two bothered to rear their ugly heads.
One of them passed in an instant, the other, well, who can remember?
Every few years I reach for How to Stop Worrying and Start Living because I forget. I’ll reread it now because I’m stuck in that mode. As Dale Carnegie says,worrying is just a vicious habit you have learned. Right now I have time on my hands. Not the kind that can let me drift. (Then, my worries go to ground.) I’m simply half in my life, half on vacation. Like carying a pack up the hill, writing has a way of sharpening my focus. Keeping me in the present, where we all belong. So I’ll sort out the dog, do what I can for the kids, then buckle down to the task.
Flipping through the pages I will leave you with a few of my favorite quotes. I hope they do for you what they do for me.
If you devoted half as much time and energy to solving your problems as you do to worrying about them, you wouldn’t have any worries.
..the only way we can avoid all criticism is to be like a Dresden-china figure and stay on a shelf. Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized, anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t . (Eleanor Roosevelt)
I finally discovered that the more I tried to pacify and to smooth over injured feelings in order to escape personal criticism, the more certain I was to increase my enemies. So finally I said to myself, If you get your head above the crowd, you’re going to be criticized. So get used to the idea.
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run…To put it another way: we are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence.
I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow. It is the dark menace of the picture that makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me
When you start worrying about things that are over and done with, you’re merely trying to saw sawdust….So why waste the tears? Of course, we have been guilty of blunders and absurdities! And so what? Who hasn’t? Even Napoleon lost one third of all the important battles he fought.
