Why worry?

No human thing is of serious importance.

Plato (427 -347 BC)

Take therefore no thought for the morrow:
for the morrow shall take thought
for the things of itself.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Matthew 6:34 (80 - 90 AD?)

Never let the future disturb you.
You will meet it, if you have to,
with the same weapons of reason
which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius ( 121 - 180 AD)

There were many terrible things in my life

and most of them never happened.

Michel de Montaigne (1533 -1592)

Do not anticipate trouble,

or worry about what may never happen.

Keep in the sunlight.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 -1790)

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles...

by the ears,by the heels,

or any other way you can manage it.

Mark Twain (1835 -1910)

It ain't no use putting up your umbrella until it rains.

Alice Caldwell-Rice (1870 -1942)

Worry is interest paid on debt not yet incurred.

William Ralph Inge (1860 -1954) 

When I look back on all these worries,

I remember the story of the old man

who said on his deathbed that

he had a lot of trouble in his life,

most of which had never happened.

Winston Churchill  (1874 -1965)

Worry is like a rocking chair -

it keeps you busy but gets you nowhere.

Many

Blessed is the person who is too busy 
to worry in the daytime
and too sleepy to worry at night.

Leo Aikman (1908 - 1978)

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow

but only saps today of its strength.

A.J. Cronin (1896 - 1981)

Linus via Charles M. Schulz (1922 -2000)

From Plato to Peanuts,
the message couldn't be clearer.
Don't worry.
Worry is fruitless.
Worry gets you nowhere.

But the message doesn't seem to be getting through.
So why worry?

Well I suppose I believe I am rehearsing
possible outcomes to problems
in the hope that if I think about them hard enough
I will be prepared for any eventuality -
a sort of insurance policy against all ills
and a superstitious proof of caring enough.

Well that might be a good enough argument, 
if having once gone through that process
I then put them in a box marked 'Dealt With' 
and left them there.
But no, I open it repeatedly
and pull out all those outcomes,
and the worry, instead of responding to this
careful re-examination by diminishing,
grows tentacles and fangs
and develops a lively personality of its own.
It is impossible to cram it back in the box.

So how can I control it?
I look back through the centuries for some help.
Most of the above sages are articulating
what I already know. 
Who is offering practical advice?

Leo Aikman says keep busy and tire yourself out.

Hmm. Not sure about that one.

The tentacled monster's insistent commentary 

plays on a loop like those annoying earworms, 

regardless of my activity level.

Vera Nazarian expresses the problem

somewhat apocalyptically,

Worry is the secret weapon perpetrated on us

by the dark forces of the world that work in the shape of

fear, uncertainty, confusion and loss.

but then rather surprisingly puts out a helping hand. . .

We on the other hand, have our own secret weapon

against those incorporeal fiends.

It is laughter.

Mark Twain is pragmatic.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles...
by the ears, by the heels
or any other way you can manage it.

Benjamin Franklin says,
Keep in the sunlight.

I will muse upon these suggestions 
with palliative remedies to hand -
 a bag of yogurt-coated apricot pieces
and a Matt cartoon.

And if anyone has drifted down as far as this
perhaps they might like to
put forward their own remedies.

We used to have an animatronic fish
called Billy Big mouth Bass that sang this song.
It was very annoying.