�Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.� ~Eckhart Tolle
via the Tiny Buddha:
There have been many times when I�ve felt overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, and desperate to feel some type of control.
There have been times when I�ve asked people for their opinions and then felt unsatisfied until I heard exactly what I wanted to hear. When I�ve made assumptions about negative things to come, and then obsessed over what I could do to prevent it, or what I should have done to avoid it.
In retrospect, all that mental busy work did very little to change what was coming.
It wasn�t even slightly useful or productive, and it definitely didn�t soften the blow if my fears came true and something went wrong or didn�t pan out.
In fact, it only exacerbated the situation because worrying essentially began the disappointment retroactively.
If you worry and nothing�s wrong, you�ve wasted precious time over nothing. If you worry and something is wrong, you�ve still wasted precious time.
Every time we use the present to stress about the future, we�re choosing to sacrifice joy today to mourn joy we might not have tomorrow. It may seem like we�re creating solutions or somehow protecting ourselves from pain, but in all reality, we�re just causing ourselves more of it.
Perhaps the key is to challenge that instinctive sense of fear we feel when we start thinking about uncertainty. When I look back at the most fulfilling parts of my life, I realize most of them took me completely by surprise.
I may not have gotten everything I wanted, but I�ve wanted what I�ve gotten more than often enough to compensate. The unknown may have provided some heartache, but it�s also provided adventure and excitement.
For every time I�ve felt disappointed, there�s been another moment when I�ve felt a sense of wonder. Those are the moments we live for�when all of a sudden we see the world through new eyes in a way we could never have known to predict.
Uncertainty is the cost of that deeply satisfying, exhilarating, spontaneous sense of awe.
It would be easy to say that mindfulness is the answer to worrying. If you�re truly immersed in the present moment, there wouldn�t be any reason to fixate on what might be coming. But I suspect that it�s inevitable we�ll do that from time to time. We�re only human, after all.
Maybe a better suggestion is a combination of being in the moment and trusting in the one to follow.
We can�t always control what it will look like, but we can know that more often than not, it will lead to something good if we�re open to it. When it doesn�t, we�ll get through it�and faster if we haven�t already overwhelmed ourselves with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios.
On the other side of worry, there�s trust. We can�t always trust in specifics, but we can trust in ourselves.[i][/i]
