Worry Not

I’ve had quite a lazy week this week, and it's been lovely. I got stuff done and pottered about, did some cooking. I even managed to get through quite a lot of work. And maybe that doesn't sound particularly lazy. But, you see, I'd decided on Monday I was going to have a “No Worry Week” - kind of like when people have their “Don’t spend a cent days” - when you want to reboot your relationship with money, so you have days where you spend not one cent and recognise you have pretty much all you currently need.

This whole year has been a veritable never-ending buffet of “Shit to be worried about.” It's exhausting. So I decided it was time for a bit of a reboot, and opted for a ‘No Worry Week’: Seven days where I made a conscious effort not to stress about anything that’s going on anywhere, and take the view that no matter how problematic any situation may seem, it will somehow find a way to all work out fine.

Mark has his own method of dealing with troubles: Instead of calling something a problem, he calls it a puzzle. In that way, from the outset, no matter what ‘the puzzle” is, it is by its very nature solvable.

That doesn't really work for me. I have the ‘problem’ hardwired into my brain. So much so that if there isn't one around, I might even be found looking for one. Sometime, long ago, I learned that part of being an adult is dealing with problems - it's how you get to categorize yourself as ‘responsible.’ And somewhere along the line, I picked up the idea that worrying is indirectly proportional - as in the more you worry about something, the less likely something bad will happen. Which is rubbish of course.

Shit happens because it does. The reason a slice of toast lands butter-side up or butter-side down is influenced by some combination of gravity and physics, not because I didn't butter it properly.

And while I'm at it, because something bad once happened, does not mean it will happen again: Like I had a terrible perm when I was 15, and I can absolutely guarantee that's never happening again.

On a practical level, worrying is completely pointless.

Life has ups, and it has downs, and that’s how it moves forward. Annoyingly, though, it seems you're not responsible unless you keep a firm eye on the downs.

Anyway, I came to a conclusion that I’ve been treating worrying like a not-so-part-time job. It takes up way too much of my time.

I don’t continually ‘wring my hands’ or ‘grind my teeth’- I save that for actual emergencies - Job requirements are instead a constant low-grade burr, that reminds me that no matter what I'm doing, I should probably be doing it better. Or that no matter what I've done already, it probably won't be enough. And then of course the trusty old favorite, ‘There’s probably something in the distant future that might happen, and if it does, then I don't know how I'll handle it.”

It sucks as a job, part-time job, or otherwise, and it's one I want to quit.

So for my “No Worry Week,” I made myself a couple of rules.

In the morning when my feet first hit the floor, I'd say to myself, “Everything today will be exactly as it's meant to be.”

This has both annoyed and confused Arthur, who waggy-tailed prefers my first words to be “breakfast time” before letting him out into the backyard to pee.

But I've found it helpful. If everything is just as it's meant to be, I don't have to be shocked or alarmed by any new information. I can just accept that it's new information. And equally when something seems immovable, I can just accept that it's not the day for that particular matter to be resolved.

Which brings me on to my next rule, which is that whenever my mind offers up what Mark would call ‘a puzzle’, I ask myself, “Is this really today's shit?” That way, instead of worrying about something that might/could/supposedly will happen, I ask myself if it is actually happening right now. If it's not, then I carry on with what is “today's shit” and deal with the matter in hand. As a result, stuff gets done. Tasks that can easily seem insurmountable literally come down to a bit of admin and a couple of phone calls.

“No Worry Week” has definitely been worth doing. I can heartily recommend it. Even though it's been a pretty productive week, I've still felt a bit like I've been on vacation.

However, that's not been the case all through Tweddley Manor. I might have quit my part-time job, but Lachlan has been doing overtime.

As the school term comes to an end, final exams loom. He’s worried and it's affecting his sleep and his mood and his appetite. We’ve had some big talks and a couple of cuddles or ten, and I've told him he really doesn't need to worry as he's already set up for what he's doing when he leaves school.

But each time I say that, he shakes his head and says, “That's easy enough for you to say, but when everyone around you is worrying, even when you don't want to, you worry too.”

And of course he's right. Worry is the chickenpox of feelings. It's ridiculously infectious.

This fact is, of course, no news at all to our ketamine-fueled tech bro billionaires. And where there's numbers, there’s numbers. Where Facebook used to be a place where you would cheekily poke someone you hadn't seen since you sat together at school, now it's a place to hear about what next level of calamitous clusterfuckery might one day come your way. Where Twitter once was a daft space for news and jokes, it's now a veritable septic tank of rage and trolling and fear.

You see there's money in worry. There's a profit to be made in terror. The algorithms are set to push posts that disturb in order to get the most clicks, which in turn provide the most cash. Social Media would not exist if it were not fueled by feelings. And it turns out that the most profitable feelings of all are the ones that do us most harm.

Are our tech billionaires worried about that? Of course not. They have tech bro worry, which is that someone else might be making another billion more than them.

Obviously their methods are not doing entirely great things for the world. In fact, their actions are creating real-life, genuine situations to be worried about.

But worry makes us powerless. It leaves us struggling to focus, unable to see the positive, and makes all tasks seem insurmountable.

And I know that because of how different everything was on my no-worry week.

So I plan to have a lot more of them. In fact, I'd like to try and make them the norm. Because when I pull my head out of worry and all the stuff that ‘might possibly happen’ and with clear eyes actually look at the world, it seems to me that there's quite a lot I’d like to change.

So I recommend them. Admittedly, “ No Worry Week” is a bit of a tongue twister, so I’ve thought of a better word to sum it up. Rebellion.

XO

PS: If you click on the heart emoji to like this post, you will be talking to my algorithm, and pointing out to it that not worrying can also be a way forward. Not that algorithms have feelings. They’re like Big Senga.

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Worry Not - Audio