Worry and Time

                       

           When I was a child learning my Catechism and the specs for mortal and venial sins, I developed an inordinately elaborate system of rationalizing whether a particular action or thought guaranteed a quick purgatorial sauté of my sorry butt or hell’s bonfires. For example, was not inviting Colleen to come play to a party because I was so jealous of her curly hair that I wanted to cut it off—mortal or venial?  Certainly a sin of omission.  Criterion 1: Was it intrinsically evil?  No, it wasn’t adultery (I wasn’t sure at the time what that was, only that adults probably did it), or anything having to do with the parts between my legs. But wasn’t it a kind of jealousy killing?  And then, if I stole her pink bunny barrette from her desk, wasn’t that (2) knowing I was doing something evil? And (3) Giving my full consent?

            Of course, that was all just silly childish exploration of how to manage feelings, but I would torture myself for having the very thoughts.  I would go to confession and veritably interrogate the priest on every point?  What makes it not mortal?  And why can’t I stop feeling jealous?  And when will this stop?  I spent so much time in the confessional rationalizing, that I was probably committing the sin of gluttony—impinging on others’ confession time, not knowing whether they should leave or pee their pants.  And then that would be my fault if they died crossing the street to the bathroom without having had their confession.  I was given the designation of “scrupulous,” and was actually proud that I was practicing in the tradition of self-flagellating monks and nuns.

And vows.  That was even worse.  If I promised God that I would become a nun if He let me heal from my bronchitis, was I then, when I could breathe easy again, stuck?

The point is, I established habits of compulsive self-torture, rationalization, and worry that are now coming out to play during the COVID-19 crisis. Worry is a function of time—What’s going to happen? Will I go to hell in the afterlife? What if? What if? What if?  Because COVID-19 can be asymptomatic, because it can take fourteen days for the virus to present, because the recovery can be lengthy and unsuccessful, it’s a recipe for worry.  If there is a crisis, worry is understandable, but not as an everyday habit.  Look at the cover image: Worry makes of our time a wasteland of distorted Dali clocks, as in the reproduction of his work above, The Persistence of Memory.  We might rename it "The Insistence of the Future." Or, perhaps, "The Resistence of the Future"—trying to have it now.

I have a buddy in compulsive worry and need for reassurance.  Any number of times during the day and in our insomniac wee hours, we Facebook message. Here’s a scenario. It doesn’t matter which of us are One or Two, we do this back and forth:

One: “Do you think it was all right that a woman passed by me in the hall without a mask?

Two: “You had a double mask on, right?”

One: “Yes, but what if the aerosol went through one of the masks?”

Two: “How far away was she?”

One: “It on the other side of the hall.”

Two: “Must have been five feet.”

One: “I don’t know.”

Two: “Let me go measure my hall…It’s at least 6 feet.”

One: “But she was yelling into her phone.  Doesn’t that count like a sneeze?”

Two: “You’re okay.  It was only a few seconds.”

One: “But what if…..”

Two: “You’re okay….

“One: “But…”

            Both my buddy and I are, you guessed it, scrupulous about our physical self-protection.  What we don’t have control over is our own self-invasive and mutually contagious habits of self-torture, rationalization, and need for constant reassurance. The most frequent responses in our threads to each other are “You’re okay. You’re okay.”  But we can’t seem to absorb the reassurance or to reassure ourselves. Every time one of forays outside our house to take a walk, or get a blood test, or a loved one gets a haircut on a tennis course in hot sun, we’re off and running the terror tapes—(c)hecking out the criteria, as I did for mortal/venial sins, and guessing and second-guessing, and rationalizing.  We are each other’s confessors, but there seems to be no absolution.  And the afterlife, in this case, after COVID-19 dies out, is what-iffy.

            The manufacturers of the clock above squared off the distorted clocks and made of the image a functional clock.  Similarly, I need to set boundaries on my future-thrusting addiction to worry. What I need to recover for myself is the capacity to live in the moment, and not compulsively worry—not to project into the future.  What I need to recover for myself is the self-soothing that healthy children develop early on.  The mind has a way of hijacking us into an unknowable future.  These times are more fraught with present dangers, but the future is always unknowable—unk-NOW-able.  The NOW is that setting of boundaries that the squared-off clock represents.

My worry buddy and I love each other dearly and are in for the long-haul, but it has occurred to me that, beyond the first reassurance, we are just enabling each other in our giving our powers away to someone else, as I did to my confessors.  We are in an endless loop of looking for reassurance, giving it, looking for it again, as if it never happened.  Then we go to others and start the loop again.  As we say in support groups, “Say it once, it’s advice.  Twice, and it’s control.”  That’s true for reassurance, “Say it once, and it’s support. Twice, and it’s control—enabling each other’s addiction to worry.”

Here’s the story of “The Fight of the Two Wolves:”

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you–and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

I just went to check our Facebook thread, as I do throughout the day.  I love being connected to her, especially during this time.  She had been worried about a blood draw and the results she would only know in a week:

Her: I gotta just get to Saturday

Me: And also get to this moment.  What’s good right now?

Her: That I don’t know anything to worry about

            Me: Oh! That’s Sweet!

            Then she fell back:

            Her: I’m on high alert. I feel faint—so anxious

            Me: Feed the other wolf.

Works Cited:

Cover Art:

Dali Clock

The Fight of Two Wolves Within You. https://deanyeong.com/fight-two-wolves-inside/