The Wonder of Worry

My thanks to Zach Yates for heping inspire this post.

Three o'clock in the morning. Time for you to awaken and worry. Don’t rise, don’t shine. Ill met by moonlight. Set for the fashionable hour to fret.

What if you become destitute? What if you never really grow up? What if you get cancer?

What if you, yes, die? Take the dirt nap? Drop off the twig? Join the Choir Invisible? Become no more?

News flash. No need to speculate on that score.

What if you lose your loves? What if you are left alone? What if the changing climate, or a Pentagon-engineered virus, or a nuclear detonation wipes us all out? What about that tedious project that’s due next month? What if you forget to go to the dry cleaners today? What then?

Future indefinite. Retreat to the past, back to the certainties. No escape there, amid the imagined slights and the real recriminations and the failures unforgotten. Open the old wounds, pour a little fresh acid on them. Romp among the unchanging ruins. What fun.

To hell with it. Drink a glass of water, refreshingly elemental, reassuringly here and now. Aphorisms afford some comfort. Worry, the economists say, is a dividend paid to disaster before it’s due. Worry, the artists say, is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.
Zennish, anyone? Center yourself in the only reality there ever is. Breathe, slowly and deeply. Listen to the night sounds, be the night sounds, the wistful train whistles, the stately courthouse bells, the steady muted metronome of the alarm clock.

Travel from the brain where you merely imagine you sit down the spinal column into the evolutionary past, a set of electro-chemical impulses in search of itself, somehow actually aware of itself, there’s the wonder.

And somewhere there, below that awareness, you are, wonder of wonders, somehow there still. Conscious or unconscious, the breaths continue.

So count them. 
In. One. 
Out. Two. 
In. Three. 
Out. Four. 
To be or not to be, you mean a lot to me. Knit one. Purl two. Two pearls. Pearls of wisdom, knitting up that old, raveled sleeve of care. Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.