He worried about choosing a topic — and then realized anxiety and how to relieve it was the point
I lay in bed this morning wondering what I would write about in my column. As the minutes slowly went by, my wonder began to turn to concern. Usually there are two or three topics that have arisen during the week that are candidates. Today, there was nothing that rose to the surface. Maybe if I got up and got going the topic would emerge. No luck!
Wonder turned to concern; concern turned to worry. I was worried! There was my topic!
Just the previous evening, I was with a friend who was worried. An organization she directed was having financial difficulties. Board members seemed distant and unconcerned. All the responsibility for addressing the problem was falling on her shoulders. Half in jest, she said she hadn’t done so much praying before in her life.
I thought afterwards, what an appropriate and profound response! The one most helpful action one can take with worry is to give it up. And if you believe in a higher power, send it in that direction.
Do you worry about how much time you spend worrying? There are alternatives to a life of anxiety (as portrayed above in Edvard Munch’s “Angst”). Prayer is certainly one. Meditation is another, which for many, is prayer without the verbalization. To sit quietly, focused on your breath, you can calm the whole body; including anxious limbs, a racing heart, even an overactive brain.\For beginners, counting your breaths to ten and then starting over again is a good technique. If you lose count, you simply start over again at one and continue. If you do that for just 10 or 15 minutes, a calmer and more centered person emerges.
Meditation can be understood as listening prayer. Your mouth is shut. Your thoughts are focused on your breath. Your ears and heart are open to what might come to you in the silence. There just might be a response to your worry.
I’ve known people who wrote about a worry. They would explain the situation fully in what they wrote, including why they were worried about it. They would add all the constructive responses they could make in that situation, then put what they wrote in an envelope, stashing it away for a week or more.
Since the worry has likely changed should they look at the note later, one begins to understand that worry doesn’t make a difference in circumstances of life. It just gets in the way of living fully.
Or what about walking off worry, or painting off worry, or singing off worry, or reading off worry? We live in tense times. The world is too much with us. If we aren’t worried about the wars around the world, or the culture and political wars in our own country, or the challenges of a changing climate, we probably aren’t paying attention. Immersing ourselves in the more enriching contributions of the human spirit enables us to confront the human tragedies with their positive counterparts.
To focus on the creative spirit that abounds around us enables us to recognize the shadow side of life for what it is, a shadow, unworthy of too much attention or anxiety.
Three things, besides a prayer of gratitude on my evening walk, push worry and anxiety aside. There needs to be at least one experience of good, uplifting music in my day. Often it will be a choir on the internet, if it isn’t available in person at the University. The in-person experience may provide the necessary uplift for a few days. But a children’s choir on the computer, or even a soloist on a talent show, will help make a more carefree day.
A second experience is the gifts provided by the natural world. The sun in the front room on a cold winter day encourages a nap instead of a worry. Watching the squirrels chase each other in the backyard releases one from human worries into animal shenanigans. Even the dog, eyeing us as it waits for a walk, calls us back into the immediate from the worry place.
The third release from worry for me is the world of fiction and myth. If this world is too much with us, I’m ready to enter another one. Reading fiction before going to sleep at night, helps me enter into a new and different dream-like dimension, free from the non-fiction of the day.
For the biblically inclined, consider: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Or: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothes?”
Or: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Or: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?”
Or: “Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up.
Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.
