Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen, anyway.
My father was a worrier. Not just a little. A full-fledged, dues-paying, regular attendee member of the community of doomsayers.
I remember as a kid of 7 years old watching him have to go to bed because of his “nerves” for fear that he was going to get laid off. He had great security in his job actually, he was the “head fixer” at the local textile mill.
You can’t knit socks when machines are down. He kept them running. He also trained other fixers. The machines were complicated and dangerous. However, he couldn’t change the oil in his car. And he worried.
If my mother was worried, I never knew it. And I decided early in life that a worrier I would not be. Mostly, I stayed true to that conviction, slipping only once terribly. A dog saved my life and I mean that literally.
A dear friend of ours, a world-traveled musician, Ron Creager, says it best and I paraphrase, I don’t worry about anything. If you worry, you experience the trauma twice. If you worry, you imagine what may happen ahead of time and if it happens; you experience the worry all over again. Worry does nothing for you because most of the time it doesn’t even happen.
L. Darryl Armstrong Ph.D. 