XIX
WORRY
Worry is wicked because it causes weakness. It robs the life of its powers; it thwarts our possibilities. Anxiety is wrong, not because it indicates infidelity as to the wise and loving providence overruling life, but because it is a criminal waste of life's forces, it prevents our doing our own work, and it irritates and hinders others.
What a great cloud would be lifted from our world if all the needless fears and frowns were chased away. One scowling man, going to his work worrying over it, will spread the contagion of apprehension and cowardly fretfulness through almost every group with which he mingles. Our mental health has as much to do with our success and happiness as any other thing.
The fog that bothers us most of all is that we carry on our faces, that which rises from our heart fears. Once savage man lived in perpetual fear of innumerable malignant spirits; civilized man lives in fear of invisible and imaginary accidents. For every real foe that has to be faced we fight out hypothetical battles with a dozen shadows.
Worry is a matter of outlook and habit. It depends, first of all, on whether you are going to take all the facts into account and look on life as a whole, or see only the dismal possibilities. Then it depends on whether you will yield continually to the blue moods that may arise from apprehension or from indigestion until you have become colour blind to all but the blue things.
How trivial are the things over which we worry, by means of which we cultivate the enslaving habit of worry, whether we will catch the approaching car or the one that will come two minutes later, whether it will rain when we want it to shine, or shine when we want it to rain.
How ineffective it all is. Whoever by worrying all night succeeded in bringing about the kind of weather he wanted? More than that, it is fatal to successfully accomplishing those things that do lie within our power. The worry over catching a train or doing a piece of work so agitates the mind and unsettles the will that it reduces the chances of efficiency.
But there are larger causes of worry than these, sickness, loss, impending disasters. Yet how futile to help and how potent to increase these ills is worry. The darkest days and the deepest sorrows need that we should be at our best to meet them. To yield to fear and fretting is to turn the powers of heart and brain from allies to enemies.
No occasion is so great or so small that we can afford to meet it either with fear or without forethought. The imperative obligation to make the most of our lives is not met by apprehending the worst, but by doing the best we can. We have no right to give to forebodings the time and force we need for preparing for and actually meeting our duties.
The best cure for worry is work. In the larger number of instances if we but do our work well we shall have no need to worry over the results. Much of our fearful fretting is but a confession of work illy done and the apprehension of deserved consequences.
Then faithful work by absorbing the thought and energies cures the habit of worry. It is the empty mind that falls first prey to foreboding, and is most easily filled with the spectres of woe. Do your work with all your might; let it go at that, knowing that no amount of further thought can affect the issue of it.
No matter how dark the way, how empty the scrip, the cheerful heart has sunshine and feasting. And this not by a blind indifference, a childish optimism, but by the blessed faculty of finding the riches that are by every wayside, of catching at all the good there is in living. If you would dispel your gloom and depreciate your burdens, begin to appreciate your blessings. Do your best, seek out the best, believe in the best, and the best shall be.