I had a thought bubble up in meditation yesterday: I can stop worrying about me. I’m not what you might call an active worrier. I don’t dwell on and mull over worried thoughts. But I do carry worry about a lot of things: the people in my life, the Circle, the Course, the state of the world. To be perfectly honest, however, if you extract worry about me from the picture, I think life would seem like a pretty happy and free affair.
What about me do I worry about? I think it’s mainly two things. First, how am I doing—am I measuring up to expectations? Second, what unpleasant thing will I have to face? These, of course, are intimately intertwined. If I don’t measure up to expectations, I worry about what consequences I’ll then have to face; the prospect of which naturally brings up the question: Will I measure up in how I deal with those consequences? And if I don’t, what will be the consequences of that? And so on.
This self-worry has got to be so much of the substance of every life. It’s like each life is a very thin donut with a very big hole in the middle. The donut is our outer activities, and the hole is this self-worry at the center. Our different lives mostly just bump outer rims, so that we don’t realize just how big the hole of self-worry is at the center of each life.
When you step back from the worry, it does seem kind of absurd. We take worry as a sign of caring. Why, then, is my caring so narrowly centered on me? Why do I care so much about this tiny part of the overall picture? Why am I not primarily caring about the other parts of the picture, and about big picture? Surely, from an objective standpoint, I am outnumbered.
Another thing that makes it absurd is that, when I worry about how well I am measuring up, the “me” I am worried about is really a very subjective image I carry of myself. It’s a loose and shifting bundle of highly subjective and biased evaluations of how well I am doing in a variety of areas. It is really a kind of fiction. Why am I so worried about this fictional character? Why not just stop caring about him?
Another thing that makes the worry absurd is that it’s not very practical. Worry about how am I doing may not actually translate into doing better. And doing better may not require all the worry. Worry about what I will face doesn’t seem very practical, either. Is there an actual practical payoff that comes from painfully anticipating things that may or may not happen?
A final thing that makes it absurd is that I really do believe more and more that I’m in God’s Hands. He’s got me covered, both my safety and my adequacy. Why not just rest in that and enjoy it?
As I thought about this topic, I got a sense of two different people in me. On the surface there is the worrier, who is also the worried about. But beneath that there is another person, one who is more of a given, more fully-formed, and thus less up for grabs, less insecure. This person approaches things in a more matter-of-fact way. He knows what he stands for. He wants to give, he wants to contribute, and he derives pleasure from doing so. He is entirely sincere. He sees a need and responds. With this me, the question is not how well is he doing, or how valid is he, but rather does he get to express or not? Is he allowed to express his natural impulse to give?
I realized I had a choice. I could live as the superficial worrier, or I could let this deeper person be himself and express himself. What it comes down to, then, is which me I choose to identify with. So I expanded my idea for the day to “I can stop worrying about me, and just express the real me.” (I don’t think, by the way, that the me I am talking about is my real Self, more like a current surface reflection of that real Self.)
Today I have shortened it to the original “I can stop worrying about me.” The idea struck me yesterday as so revolutionary, so freeing, and yet elusive—as if its full truth is just beyond my grasp—that I wanted to take another crack at it. If I really did stop worrying about me—which today seems almost possible—it would be a whole new life.
