Worts and Roses

Worrywort

Wort:  A plant. Often used in combination: liverwort; milkwort. [Middle English, from Old English wyrt; see wr d- in Indo-European roots.]wort 2 (wûrt, wôrt) 

So if a wort is a plant, this must be a worry wort and too many of them bloom in my garden. I was thinking  brooding about this all day Sunday as I did the housework. (my prime brooding time) Thinking about how I anguish over things that are Up Ahead and wishing I I could leap over time. Thinking about how I waste precious chunks of time just feeling anxious. 

And I am wondering how much of worry is superstition .... trying to jinx any imps lurking out there. Or perhaps I worry in a sort of mental tight shoe effort ... so that no matter what happens it can't be as bad as I'd worried it would be.  

During a typical worry session I begin to envy Other People who, obviously don't have anything to worry about. And I wish I were Someone Else living in a worry-less state. Someone who has few obligations so she has little or no opportunity to fail. Someone who everybody likes and so is confident of forgiveness. Well, pretty much all the rest of the world. All those Other People who have nothing to worry about!

And as I type this I realize that most of the things I worry about have to do with all those Other People. If it's just me, or just me and BD, or just me and BD and the dogs ... well. If I'd just stay home all the time, my life would be filled with endless days of ease and comfort and honestly, why would I ever go out into the world at all? 

Only, of course I go out because I like people and I like coming up with things that are fun to do ... and then doing them. And I want to be loved. I want the friendship of all those Other People. Or at least, some of them.  But the flip side of not being a hermit is a landscape crammed with opportunities to fail, to look stupid, to be foolish. And of course nobody out there could ever fail, look as stupid or be as foolish as I. 

So here I am, trying to logic myself out of this terrible bad habit. To use math to subtract it away. Because really, the things I angst over always ... well, 99% of the time ... turn out to be Not So Bad and the really flat out hideous stuff tends to come out of the blue. And now I'm starting to feel foolish and wondering what in the aich I am doing, torturing myself like this. And even if I do fail miserably at something ... who the heck cares? I mean .. just do the math. Let's say I'm planning an event and I'm not sure it's going to turn out alright and I've done pretty much everything I can think of, even if that's not everything that could have been done - because there is always something more that can be done. What possible good could happen as the result of me worrying about it? Zero. Is there anything else I would do if I were guaranteed to get Zero results from my actions? No. Okay. This is simple math. I really just need to let it go. Have fun now doing Other Things and spend the hour or two the event is happening doing all my feeling and worrying and angsting. And the rest of the time ... don't just smell the roses - be one!

Or, as Julie Andrews and Richard Burton sang in Camelot ... do like the simple folk do.