Occasionally, seeing your furrowed brow, someone might say to you, “Don’t worry, it probably won’t happen!” Little realising you were mentally choosing lottery numbers, or contemplating proposing marriage to your long-suffering partner. Good luck in both endeavours, by the way; if you could choose only one, which would it be?
Do you worry a lot? Do you sometimes worry that you worry too much? It can be quite worrying, when you worry as much as that.
As humans we are conditioned to be worriers, perhaps from as long ago as when we were cave dwellers worrying about landslides. Remember the value of your cave may go down as well as up, prices nowadays aren’t carved in stone. No, wait…
I suspect that one of our survival instincts is to suspect the worst of other people. Confessing during a police interview to the murder of a traffic warden is immediately accepted as true, whereas denial of guilt brings forth guffaws of disbelieving laughter. (Especially if the accused has in his possession a badly dented copy of the AA Users Manual, the bulky 1988 edition.) Just try telling a priest in the confessional box that you are completely free from sin, and he will stub out his cigarette impatiently and ask, “Didn’t you see the sign outside the confessional that said ‘No Time Wasters’?”
I have to concede that I am often as bad as the rest of you when it comes to finding things to worry about. How can I know if my booster is effective unless I catch the virus? Am I ageing faster than I should? Putting on too much weight? Losing too much weight? Eating the wrong food? Will my online clothes be the right size when the order finally arrives — a pointless worry, because of course they won’t. The elongated shoes will resemble something a clown would wear, and the loose flapping trousers with elasticated braces will match the shoes perfectly.
The singer Bobby McFerrin, in his 1989 Grammy Song of the Year, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy,’ reminded us that “In every life we have some trouble/When you worry you make it double,” before going on to caution us that “When you worry, your face will frown/And that will bring everybody down.” Piling Pelion on Ossa, my wife says, but then she is the brains of the family, as you have already guessed. I function more in terms of a mouse kicking an elephant’s foot when it is already bandaged.
Recommended ways to stop worrying include creating a daily ‘worry period,’ jotting down ‘a worry list’, and distinguishing between solvable and unsolvable worries, which was beyond me, so I never got around to Tip 4 — ‘take a tai chi class.’ I would fret about failing the final exam. I’ll go and add that to my worry list.
