On Worry

We, as humans, seem to love to worry. Anxiety—especially in this crazy world of 2020—runs rampant.

Luckily some wise humans have, over the centuries, learned that worry doesn’t serve us and have shared these findings for the rest of us to learn from. First, Seneca, from nearly 2,000 years ago:

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

When I read Seneca’s observation above in Letters from a Stoic I was struck by it’s similarity to a humorous, and much more recent, Mark Twain quotation:

I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

Mark Twain

Even if we can agree, though, that worry and anxiety aren’t very helpful, what do we do about it? How can we sit with those feelings?

One of my favorite all time bits of advice comes from another Stoic, Marcus Aurelius:

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius

In other words, breath. The future is made of single moments, accumulated one after another. You can only tackle one at a time.