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XIX

WORRY

Worry is wicked because it causes weakness. It robs the life of its
powers; it thwarts our possibilities. Anxiety is wrong, not because it
indicates infidelity as to the wise and loving providence overruling
life, but because it is a criminal waste of life's forces, it prevents
our doing our own work, and it irritates and hinders others.

What a great cloud would be lifted from our world if all the needless
fears and frowns were chased away. One scowling man, going to his work
worrying over it, will spread the contagion of apprehension and
cowardly fretfulness through almost every group with which he mingles.
Our mental health has as much to do with our success and happiness as
any other thing.

The fog that bothers us most of all is that we carry on our faces, that
which rises from our heart fears. Once savage man lived in perpetual
fear of innumerable malignant spirits; civilized man lives in fear of
invisible and imaginary accidents. For every real foe that has to be
faced we fight out hypothetical battles with a dozen shadows.

Worry is a matter of outlook and habit. It depends, first of all, on
whether you are going to take all the facts into account and look on
life as a whole, or see only the dismal possibilities. Then it depends
on whether you will yield continually to the blue moods that may arise
from apprehension or from indigestion until you have become colour
blind to all but the blue things.

How trivial are the things over which we worry, by means of which we
cultivate the enslaving habit of worry, whether we will catch the
approaching car or the one that will come two minutes later, whether it
will rain when we want it to shine, or shine when we want it to rain.

How ineffective it all is. Whoever by worrying all night succeeded in
bringing about the kind of weather he wanted? More than that, it is
fatal to successfully accomplishing those things that do lie within our
power. The worry over catching a train or doing a piece of work so
agitates the mind and unsettles the will that it reduces the chances of
efficiency.

But there are larger causes of worry than these, sickness, loss,
impending disasters. Yet how futile to help and how potent to increase
these ills is worry. The darkest days and the deepest sorrows need
that we should be at our best to meet them. To yield to fear and
fretting is to turn the powers of heart and brain from allies to
enemies.

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