The Worrying Disease

There are seasons when I measure my life not by the years I’ve lived but by the temperature of my own mind. I watch its weather the way a farmer watches the horizon — wary of what might roll in next. I study other people’s skies too, of course, but clean work begins with sweeping one’s own doorstep. So I sit now in the quiet and examine the climate of one small, potent word: worry.

I used to joke that I had been infected with it as a child — some cousin of malaria that entered my body and made a home for good. But it isn’t really a thought, not when it arrives. It’s a physical trespass: a hot wire drawn tight through my gut, a clamp around the lungs, a wolf at the bedroom door shaking the hinges at 3 a.m. My mind takes me on late-night tours of catastrophe — the collapse of everything I love, rehearsals of disaster played on repeat.

Here’s the irony: I have stood many times at the brink I imagine. I have felt my toes hang over the ledge of “what if there is no next step,” certain that the drop was designed for me alone. More than once I have thought, Maybe the work is to stop fighting. Maybe the fall itself is the will of heaven. Not a leap of faith — that’s far too romantic — but a surrender into blackness because I’m too tired to brace anymore.

And then I catch myself in a counseling chair, speaking into someone else’s despair. A client tells me their mind gnaws on its own bones through the night, and I hear myself offering them marrow and bread. I could call myself a hypocrite — and some days I do — except that the one who has been strangled by the darkness also knows the truth hidden in at least a dozen dawns: that there is always a path, even when we have gone color-blind to possibility.

Maybe the cliff is real — but maybe it is the picture that is wrong. Maybe our two human eyes are the least qualified witnesses of our own lives.

I have taken steps before with no evidence that they would land on anything solid, and found myself delivered into fields of goodness I could not have diagrammed on my best day. If I know that, really know it in my marrow, why does worry still sink its teeth into my shoulders? Why does dread still pace the edges of my bed? I am tired of its tenancy.

And then the old teachings rise — not from a book so much as from memory stored in bone: Fear is not proof of abandonment. Faith is not the absence of tremor; it is the willingness to walk while trembling. Anyone can trust when the sky is blue. The real measure is whether you lift your foot when the sky is black.

This road we are born onto is not paved smooth. It is studded with stones named terror, despair, uncertainty — pressed right beside the ones named mercy, opening, provision, and relief. We walk on all of them.

What saves me, more than anything, are the people who wander in seeking help and end up helping me see again. We steady one another without meaning to — a kind of mutual sight-giving. One candle lighting another, and the room grows brighter without either flame losing anything of itself.

Maybe I still stand at the cliff. Maybe I still quake at the not-knowing. But I also know this: when I have set my shaking hand into the hand of the Holy — call it what you will — roads have appeared underfoot like dry land parting from under water.

We are all half-blind to the largeness that holds us. That might be by design — perhaps glory this large would scorch our retinas. Our work is smaller: not to see the whole, but to trust what we cannot see and step anyway.

So take my hand, you who worry alongside me — kin of the sleepless and high-strung. Let us walk on in the dark together, not waiting to feel fearless but moving while afraid, and counting it as courage. This life is too astonishing to sleepwalk through it arguing with phantoms. If a path keeps opening under every trembling footfall, maybe that is the real story and worry has only ever been the decoy.

Hari Om  Tat Sat