Worry

Today I was distracted and not exactly living in the moment. It's funny, it takes a reflection on my day to realize that I wasn't truly experiencing my day. A lot of my energy was spent on thinking about the possibilities of my evening. Over the weekend I had two small occurrences that seemed to rub people the wrong way. Neither of them were serious, and neither were intentional, but still I don't like creating dissonance with my friends and acquaintances. I knew that this evening I would be talking to them at a social gathering and so I was anxious.

Really the whole thing seems silly in retrospect. I did try and tell myself that as the day progressed but there was this unfinished business and I didn't know how it would be handled. It seems so difficult to let go of some things that my mind has fixated on. No matter how many times I reminded myself things were fine, my imagination insisted on playing out scenarios. I found myself a victim to my own thoughts and I even found myself upset as I imagined one of many outcomes. It seems to take a lot of work to try and calm my mind and bring it back to the present rather than the "what ifs." I wasn't very successful either. Perhaps this is why meditation and bringing yourself into the moment is considered practice. It is never something you perfect; always just practice. My mind seems to be untameable and wild sometimes. I wonder if I will gain more power to refocus on now if I continue to work at it. I know people who always seem peaceful and I wonder if their secret is that they are not worrying about things.

So the evening came and went and the dramas that I had imagined in my head never came to be. There wasn't much more than a shrug in all the talks of the evening. The wasted energy of the day was just that, wasted. I am not upset though because it is a good learning experience. Rather than letting the time be a complete loss and losing even more by dwelling in the past, I am going to take the lesson and move forward.

Worrying is not productive or helpful. Perhaps in my worries the thing to do is to find a way to confront them and not let it linger off in the future. Today I could have taken action and contacted the people I needed to talk to rather than fretting the day away while waiting to see them. This would have ended my mind's cycles and helped to actually move my day forward.

Maybe worry is just the embodiment of inaction. Perhaps it is just the product of being a victim of life rather than actually participating and forging my own path.