Our Particular Worries

There are two main worries into which most symptoms play and from which many tragedies may be interpreted.

Both have to do with a man’s place in the sun, and with the measurement of his stride against the landscape.

Let us not speak in riddles—in plain English, the two big worries are for money and for health; the two great fears are those of losing the one or the other.  Man, unlike a dog, is never happy when he runs behind.  When he spends more than he makes, either of money or of nerve-force, he promptly begins to worry.  His sleep is troubled.  He cannot play.  His care pursues him to town.

Under the huge cloud-pillar of the war, each of us has his own private lesser pillar of cloud by day.  Most pillars hold something up, or can be leaned against—not so with these.  You can high back at a substance, but what is the use of battling with a nebula?  No choice of weapons avails in a duel with a ghost.

Suppose every worry you have were at once erased.  Suppose this particular anxiousness, be it enormous or minute, that you are trying to hide at this moment were wrested from you as a nurse would snatch from a baby something not good for it.  You know that you would straightway go and get some other worry in its place.

It is a habit of mind you must resist rather than any narrowly specialized phase or particular phenomenon.

The fascinating enigma of the action of the brain has proved the most baffling of any that surgical research has sought to answer, and we of the laity must be content with whatever comfort it is to know that a great many of the grotesque tricks played upon us by our own wits are not worth bothering about—it is the mulling over them that matters.

If you in any form have given “hostages to fortune,” the luxury of worry is one you must deny yourself, for it is not on record that any cause or any living being was ever helped thereby.