NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO WORRY
Many years ago one of my friends decided to top himself with a drug overdose at the ripe old age of 23
After his funeral I rode my mountain bike up to the top of a local hill and sat looking out over the view. Strangely a voice in my head seemed to say “don’t worry about it, there’s no point worrying about anything – what is done is done”
I felt like a huge burden had just been lifted and his death had one good side effect. Downhill racing was a new sport back then but I was fully into it, so I let rip, with no worries whatsoever and had a very fast clean run back down the hill.
Later on when I first started blogging on the Steemit blockchain, I did a post about not worrying. It was probably one of my better posts, but it only got six votes and earned me zero cents. From that point every time I heard anyone bleating about how shit their payout was, I just thought “don’t worry about it”
I guess, if we are lucky, one day we arrive at a point when we realise a lot of our friends are long gone, as our many of our heroes. Or maybe most of them…
And these days if I find myself living with a daily dose of pain from all the injuries I wasn’t worried about getting back then, there is no point worrying about that either. I know what the alternative is…
Something I never used to do was mention personal stuff like voices in my head. But a voice in my head just said “repost that worry post again, and don’t fucking worry about any of this New World Order shit – you are not here to worry”
So here is an updated version of my post from August 2016:
IT’S BEYOND OUR CONTROL
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/it-s-beyond-our-control
“Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry or not” – is an excellent quote from Ana Monnar
The wisdom inherent in that saying is vast. People are endlessly addicted to worrying – from my mother to about half of everyone who posts anything on the internet. Self help gurus like Louise Hay are constantly saying that what you think about and focus on become your reality. And Carl Jung once said “What you resist persists”. There are many variations of the basic premise that what you focus on, you get more of.
Now the whole process seems to have accelerated, and it’s like watching life at hyper speed. I’m watching people posting about corruption, censorship, oppression, incompetence, dire future predictions, and daunting realisations. And I’ve long been drawn to all that stuff myself. But it’s essentially all beyond my control.
Sometimes I’d like to read more posts full of wisdom, hope, positive predictions, and ground breaking new ideas. Something Louise Hay always said was “the only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed” – or as Bobby McFerrin once sang, “don’t worry, be happy”
I’m not writing this from a background of being a happy go lucky, glass half full, positive sort of guy. I’m writing it from a history of being a “conspiracy theorist” since well before 911, who has been calling “bullshit” since I first learnt the words “bull” and “shit” and grasped that it was possible to connect words together without hyphens.
Now I could go on about end of the world bullshit until the cows come home, and I often do, but it doesn’t do me much good.
The whole “it’s the end of the world and everything is buggered” mindset is just a big black hole. Really, it’s all a giant collection of monsters under the bed, designed to keep people in a state of fear and worry. But there is a good side to this stuff too. As I’ve written on the odd web page or two, there is no “global warming” or “climate change”, oil is abiotic, it’s not a fossil fuel, so is in no danger of ever running out, there are no “nuclear bombs” (they are entirely a fabrication) and mankind as a whole currently enjoys the highest overall standard of living (lifespan, education, income and all sorts of other cool stuff) of any time in human history.
Maybe (just maybe at this point, because I don’t quite take to this idea like a duck to water just yet) the idea that we are on the brink of giant, and permanent, financial and social apocalypse is not fixed in stone, it’s just one of the options. Either way, worrying about it is not going to prevent any collapse, so it going to do any of us any good. I follow a range of podcasters online such as Jeff Berwick’s (dollarvigilante) and I certainly take into account what they are saying. But let’s face it, I’m not going to flee to Mexico (I live in New Zealand) and if whatever I choose to focus on makes that possible future more likely, I’d be better off to focus on what I want rather that what all the fudporn is saying. Admittedly the fudporn does look pretty accurate, but the globalists are hand feeding it to us so it probably isn’t helpful.
So here is my thought for the day, and it’s very new one for me – what if the “coming apocalypse” is no more real than “global warming”?
25 great quotes about worry
• “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
– Leo F. Buscaglia
• “Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.”
– Swedish Proverb
• “If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.”
– E. Joseph Cossman
• ”People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
– George Bernard Shaw
• “Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.”
– Dale Carnegie
• “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
– Elbert Hubbard
• “If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”
– George F. Burns
• “When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”
– Winston Churchill
• “Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
– Arthur Somers Roche
• “If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.”
– Dean Smith
• “When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.”
– Joseph Joubert
• “That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.”
– Chinese Proverb
• “Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.”
– Cullen Hightower
• “Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere”
– Erma Bombeck
• “There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem.”
– Harold Stephen
• “People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching a cold.”
– John Jay Chapman
• “Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.”
– Nelson DeMille
• “The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”
– Robert Frost
• “Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
• “We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”
– John Newton
• “If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.”
– Dale Carnegie
• “I never worry about action, but only about inaction.”
– Winston Churchill
• “Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff.”
– Robert Eliot
• “A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.”
– John Lubbock
• “Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.”
– Mary Hemingway
These quotes are from http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2014/07/16/worry-quotes/
And if you need a few more, here are another 519 more worry quotes – http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/worry
@frot is a professional worry management analyst and crypto-currency investor from Wellington, New Zealand. In between meditating and making lists he likes to watch podcasts about the coming demise of human civilization and is currently developing a new website called https://www.frot.co.nz