“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”- Thomas Carlyle
I don’t know about you but the battle with worry is one that I have taken years to call a truce with. I don’t say win, because it is tempting sometimes for me to find myself “concerned” or “apprehensive”, synonyms for that “w” word that my mind tricks me by using. My ears are very in tune to hear the worry word when other people speak it, and to mentally say to myself “fear”, but my tricky mind has caught on and doesn’t allow me to use the word when referring to my own feelings. Instead it subs in other terms, “I am concerned about….” or “I am scared that…” I know that worry and its many forms are caused by thinking too much about the past or possible futures. Our minds as we know are supercomputers, super creative and imaginative, look at the world we have created with our human intelligence! Anything you see was once just an idea in someone’s mind.
How do we really harness the power of our minds and take the lessons we have learned in our past with us to help us make decisions in the now without holding on to the negativity from the failures? How do we direct it’s tendency to look for all the things it’s afraid of in the future?
It begins by seeing every painful experience as a learning tool, and by redefining your past. It’s true that you can’t physically go back to the past and re-do anything, but what you can do which is incredibly powerful is to mentally go back and change how you define it. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to be able to see what possible good can come out of our past, especially if it was extremely painful. But one of the gifts we have as human beings is the ability to control our own minds and what we think about. It takes practice. It takes looking at the course of your life and how each decision and success and failure has brought you to this moment, today. It takes realizing and remembering and reminding yourself always that how you live today is the true indicator of how your tomorrows will be.
If you are worried now about tomorrow, you will be worried tomorrow about Friday. Stop the cycle and take control of your thoughts. The future is today. The best way to prepare for tomorrow is to use all of your intelligence, your enthusiasm, on doing today superbly. Worry is a synonym for fear. Look it up. The thesaurus also lists misery, anguish, pain, woe…all words that mean the same thing as worry. I for one do not want to live in that place where those words describe my life. Misery has been candy-coated into the “W” word. Let it go.