Plague Journal (3)

Yesterday was what has become a pretty ordinary day for me. A morning of "working from home," which is a mixture of frustration, tedium, and small satisfactions. Then a walk, dropping off some more books at a "little free library," a visit to the drug store to buy some nitrile gloves (still no TP on the shelves though), to the grocery store to buy some flowers for my honey. The rest of the day was the usual reading stuff on the Internet, watching a movie, going to bed early because this low-level repressed worry turns out to be exhausting.

I want to say something about worry. I don't consider myself a worrier, but what that really means is that I don't show it, I don't display my worry, I don't generally share it or admit to it, but it's there. Us worry-repressers tend not to like to be around our opposites, the outspoken worriers. These folks are always worried, and it seems to us that they would rather be worrying than not. It seems like a kind of addiction. Most of the time they worry about things they can't change, or every small furry animal in the woods, or politics, etc. Us repressers have an instinct to run from them, scoff at them, or if we are in a kindly mood, reassure them somehow.

My mother would say, if I was worried about anything, to just get up and do something, don't just sit there thinking about it. Get busy with your hands. Wash the dishes, fix a leaky faucet, build a birdhouse. Some people eat. Some people go shopping. Or hit the bottle. Or a combination of all these things. If somebody's house is full of useless decorative goo-gaws, that's probably the result of worry-shopping. If it's always immaculately clean, that could be the result of worry-cleaning. If someone seems to be putting on weight and always with a hangover-headache, well, you get the picture.

But my mother's advice was, as usual, wise. Get out of your head and into your hands. Get busy doing something constructive. Jesus said trouble would always be around the corner. This would seem to justify constant worry, but the Man did say next that he had overcome what is around the corner. You can look it up!

But in another sense you can never really "get out of your head." That's where we live. And then what is in our heads inevitably works itself into our hands. If it's worry, then our hands tremble, and if we're building a birdhouse we wind up slamming a thumb with the hammer. Damn, this gets complicated, doesn't it!

So while my mother's advice was sound, there is another level, another layer of work to be done. That is to change the input. To get something into our heads that is not worry or justifications for worry. Music, poetry, art, nature, a good book, mathematics, science, or as Paul said, "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." [Phil. 4:8]

Another way to put it: think on Jesus. When Jesus tells his disciples, on the eve of his lynching, "Fear not, for I have overcome the world," he is enlarging their understanding of the world, replacing it with a more encompassing view. In other words, we think at certain moments that the world is simply full of justifications for worry, and we're right. But add this to your understanding, says Jesus. In some ultimately significant way he has overcome all our justifications for worry. If this seems rather "spacey" to you (as we used to say back in high school), rather unreal or theoretical, my advice is to sit down and read the Gospel of John (or Matthew, or Mark, or Luke) to see how real it became for Jesus. He took on all our justifications for worry in mortal combat, and he won the day.