My wife and I have two adult kids and you better believe we worry about them. We’re proud of worrying about them and we intend to keep worrying about them even if they don’t want us to.
Anxiety is perfectly normal and has an evolved survival function. It provides signals to us about threat. It alerts us to the tiger that might be dwelling in the bushes. It might alert us as well to what will happen if we don’t listen carefully to our partner, or what might happen if we don’t go see that doctor about this funny lump in our neck. There’s a place for healthy anxiety. I wish I had been more anxious about saving a little bit of money in my 20s and 30s, which would have helped me later on in life, rather than just totally resisting the advice of my parents.
When Worry Gets in the Way
Interestingly, I’ve learned from Gil Fronsdal that a way of translating the Pali word, in early Buddhism, that’s routinely translated as hindrances, is as coverings. Coverings, isn’t that interesting? These are coverings over the beautiful true nature that is inherent in all of us but is covered over by various things. One of them is the hindrance of restlessness and worry. This is rumination, this is mental preoccupation.
Worrying that is not productive hinders your progress on the path, and hinders relationships, hinders productivity at work. It saps energy. It pulls us away from the present as it is, and gets us caught up in mental time travel about the future or being preoccupied about the past.
We worry about what we’ve done. We worry if we’ll ever be able to repair something. We worry about people who are estranged from us and what will happen. So it’s really understandable. And what can we do about it?
Welcome It, Thank It, Then Hang Up the Phone
What’s really useful is to ask yourself, what’s productive here? What’s useful? Welcome, worry. Thank you, worry. What do you have to say?
At the point that you’ve gotten the message, you can hang up the phone. I got it. I understand there are certain things that are uncertain. I understand that there are things that are beyond my control. I understand that some bad things might happen. I don’t know. And meanwhile, I’m going to do what I can. Thank you, but I don’t need to add worry to my discerning and my planning and my acting.
I can disrupt ruminating, which is like a cow chewing its cud. I can interrupt laps around the rumination track. I can glean the value, I can harvest the value. I can squeeze the juice out of that orange of worrying and then release the rind, release the part that’s not so helpful.
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The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.