What's the Worst That Could Happen?

Most of us worry far more than we should. Our worries take us far beyond our actual circumstances, to things we can't control, can't predict and can't change. What if I lose my job? What if my spouse leaves me or cheats on me? What if I get sick or injured or have a wreck? Fear and worry take us to the dark corners of What Might Happen, to untold shame and embarrassment and failures. The phrase "beyond our wildest imagination" doesn't apply: most of our imaginations are pretty wild. There's a lot of anxiety in the closet, and when it starts howling and beating around, the shadows can grow pretty dark. Some of you know what I mean.

We worry, yet almost anything is survivable. We're far more resilient than we think, and sometimes it takes a stern test to teach us what we're capable of. Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways. The loss of a job or a love, though devastating at the time, can become our finest hour. Which doesn't mean we should be negligent, inviting disaster just for the rush of working our way out. If my life is to have a purpose I have apply my gifts conscientiously. I have to act knowing actions have consequences, and the accumulation of the small choices I make become my destiny. I have to remember to be on time and pay attention and respect my spouse's feelings and meet her needs. Living consciously and conscientiously is an antidote to worry.

Worry creeps in in the empty spaces of the day, when we are alone with our thoughts, after a bad moment or bad day when stress is having a heyday in our unoccupied and unattended brain. Night worries are the worst, just before sleep. I can work myself into a dither, and suddenly my wife's snoring and the electric fan are just unbearable. I can't get comfortable. I can't stop thinking in circles. I have to get up for a while, and occupy myself with a book or Internet chess or dime poker, just to quiet the squabbling demons of doubt and uncertainty wreaking their havoc at the door of my soul. My boss called me into the conference room again yesterday. Two months ago I'd been five minutes late coming back from lunch. He'd wrote it down and saved it, and now he had his assembled evidence. Day after day I come in seven minutes early to start up the computer off the clock, and now my job was on the line for stopping to use the toilet and wash my hands, or a sandwich line that was too long. He keeps track of every petty crime because he is a petty man. He wants the joy of lording it over me. It makes him feel important, this buffoon who can't spell ordinary words. He wants me to grovel or look distressed. I won't do either. I'm kind to the customers, even when he is petty and brutal to me. One of these days he'll get to issue his second written warning, and then the last. I'll be fired. It's just as well. I can find another lousy job somewhere else.

At a garage sale a couple of months ago, in Crescent City when we were visiting Marie's mother, I found several incredible bargains. I think I could make a living buying and selling things I find, a bookcase for a dollar, six pairs of men's casual shorts for a quarter each. Buy cheap and sell reasonable, a simple formula. Obviously I won't do that, it's too uncertain and bound to meet complications, but the elegance and craft of it appeals to me, living by your wits, being an itinerant peddler. I'm cut out for that in my farmboy soul. It's a pleasant diversion from worry, this idle contemplation, an alternate universe of a pickup and a cardboard sign and a lunch of baked chicken from Winco and a couple of pieces of fruit. A life without the small agonies and indignities of a working life, no clocks to punch, no empty slogans and acronyms to cite. There's an old bumper sticker that said, "stop the world, I want to get off." Part of me wants to get out of the world, to a place where their are no cell phones and two-year contracts, a place where there is no insipid hold music or form letters or collection notices. Oh, I'll do the right thing and be responsible. But I remember days when I had to collect pop cans to buy lunch, and I know in my heart those days were no worse than this, these days where my dignity and identity and worth are in the hands of man who hasn't had an original thought or said a meaningful prayer in his entire life, a soulless and unoriginal and fundamentally cruel man, hardly a man at all, hiding behind his petty little authority. Some people live by the credo, "I have as little authority as anyone, and I'm going to use every bit of it." I don't care what he does or says to me, or how many stern memos he misspells.

He can't do anything to me that will matter a bit six months from now. The worst that could happen is just another turn in the road.