Have you discovered your internal worrier? It seems to be an often well hidden, auto-response to life, or at least it does here … or should I say did. The other night I realized that I spent a lot of time being extremely conscious (do you like how I rebranded worry?) of how I interact with life.
I have two studio apartments at the farm that I rent out. One is upstairs, the other down. I have done everything possible, including ripping up flooring and replacing it with sound absorbing cushioning and deep carpet to keep the noise from travelling. It’s an old building, so you can guess how successful I have been.
Rather than being satisfied with all that I had done, I quietly prescreened for heavy feet, limited occupancy to one, and paid attention to interviewees penchant for being loud. Perhaps all of those were important. I am guessing they helped, but I really don’t know.
The other night I noticed that I was concerned each time I used water since the pump comes on in the lower unit when the pressure tank gets low. Seeing it, I stopped and realized I was walking on eggshells in my own home. It wasn’t a surprise. I was raised to nurture, to care about others before myself and that’s gotten me into trouble more often than I’d like to fess up to.
It’s why I stayed in a marriage long past its expiration date, why I didn’t leave corporate America years before I did … heck, it’s the why of most every painful experience I have put up with. I would have said, ‘tolerated even once I learned the lesson’, before so clearly seeing this latent tendency which I obviously didn’t grasp until a few days ago.
I wonder if this is a female thing or if guys do it too. Feel free to chime in if you have experience with worrying about things that you really don’t need to. Is there something we need to worry about? I don’t think so, but I’m open to hearing what you think it might be.
Following my ah-ha moment, it was fun to pick apart the story … the ‘what’ that would happen if I turned the water on, if the noise travelled, if a tenant was unhappy. Oh my God … they might get irritated; they might move. Well … many have moved in and moved out and the world is still spinning on its axis.
Seeing what I was doing, the decision was made. I spent a lifetime walking on eggshells in my first marriage. I created a pattern, a well-worn rut that was easy to fall into, automatic to say the least. I fell into it with family members who were far different from me. I fell into it in my last horrible attempt at a relationship, and I fell into it with my tenants.
It was so natural to be in the rut that I didn’t feel the fall. I didn’t notice that it was dampening my joy and happiness. I didn’t notice the tightening of my gut, the hardening of my heart, the shrinking of my being. This energy I call me was fundamentally expanding, so I didn’t notice it. I felt more and that felt good, so I didn’t notice the inherent limitation, limitation that I unwittingly placed on myself. Now that I look at it, I am not sure I even noticed the worry. It wasn’t worry to me, it was consideration, compassion, caring.
It’s alarming how sneaky worry is.
There are so many things to worry about and we tend to do it without thinking. It’s a robotic way of being and not just easy to miss, but hard to see. We take the ‘givens’ in our lives as just the way life is. It’s not. We worry about the Middle East – is this the end of times? We worry about climate shift – is this the end of the planet? We worry about our kids, our families, our friends, the homeless, immigrants, gunman walking into where we are having dinner and opening fire, crimes of hate and the growing polarities. Worry is a mental illness, a habit that is so engrained that we fail to notice it.
Worrying wears out and tears up our bodies. It acts like a vice on the heart, and twists the mind into shapes it wouldn’t assume on its own. Standing at the sink, worried about turning on the water, I could feel the tension in my body, the quiet agitation in my soul. I noticed, and I stopped. I didn’t want to live my life that way anymore.
Worry is an attempt to control. It is the prime mover and shaker of the seemingly insatiable need to restrict and reform outcomes … and it’s never worked. Not once. Shit happens. People leave. Relationships break down. Wars break out. It’s life, and life isn’t just the good stuff. It comes with a death sentence, for heaven’s sake.
I didn’t see the depth and breadth of worry until this week. It seems I wasn’t ready to see it, to let it in sooner, or I would have seen it for it surely was here. I didn’t, so it seems I wasn’t. It’s miraculous to me how life unwinds itself, how it brings us the perfect experiences to crack us open and let the fallacies we hang onto fall out. It’s easier now. I don’t fight the seeing, or argue with what I see, like I used to. To me, that’s kinda cool.
I am astounded by how worry lived within me. Now I notice when I feel the worry contraction and get to decide – or so it seems – whether I will do or not do what I was going to do, only now if I go ahead with it, it’s not out of worry. It’s done with awareness, not in a knee-jerk reaction. Some things still get done, but differently. Some … slip into the category of ‘did that, took it off my list.’
There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk. That said with a giggle, check out Amaya’s new book – Actuality: infinity at play, available in paperback and e-book at Amazon.
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