Leave Your Worries At The Door

While the rest of the world sleeps, I can worry about the crampy feel­ing in my right side and the fact that I gained three pounds in a day, and then worry  that the crampy feel­ing and the sud­den weight gain point to an aggres­sive tumor, which means we won’t be able to travel this win­ter because I will be busy hav­ing chemotherapy.

In the clear light of day, rea­son will tell me that I have always had the crampy feel­ing mid­way through my men­strual cycle (for­give the over shar­ing), and that most likely, the overnight weight gain can be blamed on salt or some other dietary vagary.

I go on to worry that Oldest has not got­ten on Obamacare in time to have cov­er­age and that if he gets a job at Killington Mountain as planned, he could poten­tially break his neck while snow­board­ing in a glade and not be cov­ered by health insur­ance. Then I worry that there is some­thing inher­ently wrong with me for focus­ing more on our finan­cial expo­sure than on the poten­tial injury to my firstborn.

After dis­pens­ing with Oldest’s spine and my moral bank­ruptcy, I move on to Youngest and worry that he has secretly dropped out of col­lege to tour with his band.

As for the ebola out­break in West Africa and behead­ings, I can’t worry about those things because they are way too overwhelming.

While I don’t believe in God, I very much enjoy my Congregational church and the teach­ings of Jesus. As the Reverend spoke about the point­less­ness of worry, I thought about how lib­er­at­ing it must be to sim­ply dis­card all of one’s free-floating anx­i­ety as eas­ily as dis­card­ing a paper cup. Unfortunately, because I lack faith, I will never be able to fully relin­quish my paper cup.

Another prob­lem that I saw right away with the idea of com­pletely renounc­ing worry was that once you renounced it, wouldn’t you be wracked with guilt over your fail­ure to ade­quately worry? What if the thing you should have been wor­ry­ing about came to pass? Not only that, but if you don’t worry, who will?

As I write this, My Royal Consort is try­ing to make me worry about a pos­si­ble storm com­ing up the east coast that might derail Youngest’s travel plans. This actu­ally hap­pened last year because I failed to worry enough about it, there­fore it took him two days to fly from North Carolina to Rhode Island. I felt guilty—I should have been more wor­ried about what was clearly a very sloppy weather event.

Despite these doubts, the ser­mon res­onated with me, and got me think­ing about how I could be more dis­crim­i­nat­ing in my wor­ry­ing, and make more of an effort to con­fine my anx­i­ety to things that are truly wor­ri­some. Right then and there, I made peace with the fact that even as a non-believer, I could still do some purg­ing in my worry closet and not feel guilty.

Yes, I thought, it is the moments like this that make church so worth­while for me. It is the peace and fel­low­ship that I get each week that keep me from blow­ing money on Klonopin, gong baths, psy­chother­apy and yoga. Without the lit­tle dose of hymn singing and quiet reflec­tion each week, I would def­i­nitely be drink­ing more wine and smok­ing more weed than I should.

As I qui­etly exalted in my new resolve to van­quish point­less worry, my friend Lee Anne nudged me and pointed across the aisle.

I had become friendly with the woman Lee Anne was point­ing to sev­eral years ago. We would bump into each other after church in the pro­duce aisle of the gro­cery store. She is elderly but quite  steady on her feet, with a lovely face and long white hair that she wears in a clip. She always sits in the same place and is usu­ally a lit­tle bit late because she lives sev­eral towns away.

Startled out of my reverie, I looked over to where Lee Anne was point­ing and saw that my elderly friend, Jeannette, was try­ing valiantly to remain awake dur­ing the ser­mon. Sitting near the end of the pew, she would slump over to one side and then abruptly right her­self, before sag­ging back over to her side. This pat­tern was being repeated over and over again with impres­sive fre­quency and regularity.

I com­pletely lost track of the Reverend, her mes­sage, and my res­o­lu­tion to relin­quish worry, and focused my full atten­tion on Jeannette and the solidly wrought wooden arm­rest of the pew. She’s going all the way this time, I wor­ried, with my heart in my mouth. But then, just when I had braced myself for the dull smack of her skull upon the ven­er­a­ble oaken pew—the sound that I imag­ined would surely accom­pany her inevitable tra­jec­tory onto the floor— she would rouse herself.

Had I been some­one who could sim­ply offer up all my worry to the Almighty, I would have quickly resumed my worry-free idyll, secure in the knowl­edge that God would keep Jeanette’s butt securely anchored in her pew where it belonged. But being a non-believer, I knew that the only thing between her and a face-plant into the aisle was my laser beam gaze and con­stant vig­i­lance. Then I started to worry that I might have a God complex.

I had been groov­ing on the idea of a worry-free exis­tence up until the moment I got spir­i­tual blue balls over the sleepy sep­tu­a­ge­nar­ian. This net­tle­some inter­rup­tion, just as I was set­tling into some honest-to-goodness enlight­en­ment, made me feel like I had been awak­ened from a sex dream by a fire drill. I was so close!