Worry and Hope

I have reflected about hope this week because it was the Sunday/week of hope on the Advent calendar.  

I have been mindful of the grief and loss side of the coin.  Today I am mindful of a particular person whom I know who shall remain nameless.  When I worked with that person, she would constantly say “I hope.”  She would also say “I hope you’re right.”   She did accept any answers or reassurances.   She was frustrating to deal with because she would not shut up but would keep babbling on about her worries.

I came to appreciate this person as a chronic worrier and a control freak.  Since the time I stopped working with her I have been reminded of her chronic worrying and her tendency to say “I hope.”  I have came away with a personal challenge to myself: Do you really hope, or are you just worried?

As a mental health professional I tell my clients and patients that worry is a form of anxiety that occurs when we dwell on matters that are out of our hands and that we do not control.  I frequently quote Wayne Dyer’s famous statement that it makes no sense to worry about things you do not control. 

Despite all advice to the contrary people still worry and will continue to worry.  Many worry to have something to do. Many worry because they cannot sit still and be still.  Many people do not accept their limits as human beings and so they worry in the belief that they should be doing something.  Worry as a habit is a reality of human existence.

I am inclined to believe that worry is related to the amount of risk we are taking in a situation.   If we are taking a big risk, we will tend to worry more.

There are a number of worries at the holidays.  Will our relatives behave?  Will that particular relative not get drunk and offend others?  Will we get our holiday shopping done? Will we make our connecting flight in Chicago?  Some of the worries are silly and some are serious.

A consideration here is that worry is that as a form of anxiety stimulates the production of Adrenalin.  The Adrenalin does not let us relax or go to sleep.  It makes our muscles tense and may give us headaches and stomachaches.  We feel all the more stressed.

Worry is typically a present behavior focused on the present or future.  However, many of us worry about the past. We can dwell on abuse, unfortunate events and mistakes. We can become absorbed by those past events and distress ourselves into panic.  We can generate a delusion of hope that the past will be different.   I imagine that Aaron Beck had a heyday with this in his development of Cognitive Theory.

So, we can be worrying and say we hope, but are we truly hoping?  Or are we just covering up the fact we are worrying?   Worry can be a dead end if not just a waste of time.  Worry can make us an annoyance and irritation to those around us.

We cannot stop others from worrying and we cannot keep them from worrying.  Worry is their choice.  However, chances are many of us will hear criticism couched in the statement “I’m worried about you because . . .”    The “because” is typically something that is something the worrier cannot control but wants to use to control you.   Telling the worrier that you are sorry that they are worrying, but not feeling guilty over their worrying is a coping skill.  In the end we can only stop our own worry and do our own hoping.

True hope seems to be a perspective that calls us to compartmentalize and either act in the world or commit inside of ourselves to surrender to our limitations and to focus our minds on what is real and what is necessary.    There will always be conditions and events outside of our control, whether they be someone else’s responsibility or an event that was in the past or present. 

Christmas does invite us to look at our spiritual hope.  The layers of tradition have a way of covering up the invitation by decking the halls and ringing bells and talking about Santa.    The tradition and the nostalgia can amount to nothing and loses significance as time goes by.  Even the crèche or nativity scene loses significance if we are not reminded that we cannot save ourselves from our own sin.  We have hope out of the realization of our need of God’s grace and interaction in our lives.  

Disappointments and Worry: Reviewing the Past and Looking Ahead

At this time of year all the local television news operations do a retrospective on the ending year.  In other words they review what happened since the last time they did the same type of report.

Many of us do the same kind of accounting in our own lives.  We look back at what happened. We look at what we did.  We also may look back at what we should have done or should have done better.

On the flip side, we may look ahead at our expectations, fears, and goals. 

In these reviews the challenge is not to panic ourselves, not overly shame ourselves and not get consumed in resentment.

The Past Year.

We live in a complicated world and it seems safe to say that the past year was what it was.   What some people see as good others see as bad.  For example, some people were happy that Barack Obama was re-elected and some saw it as a bad thing.  Another example is gay marriage--some people saw it as good and some saw it as evil.   Saying what the past year was is very much an individual matter. 

Hindsight is Not Merely 20-20. 

The old adage is that "hindsight is 20-20."  It is assumed that we look back at the past and can see more than we saw while we were going through something.   I think that is a mistake.  We never look back at the past with 20-20 vision.  We look at the past with a sense of weighted judgment.  

How we look back at the past depends much on our current emotion, and what appears to be a present consequence of the past.  We may be glad we made a choice, or we may be sad or even mad that we made a certain choice. 

I have met many people who admit having been consumed over many years by . . . and beating themselves up over the way things or people have turned out.   Some of these people were sold on these failures as absolute facts. They assumed reality--that something else would have happened if they did something differently.    From this point in the present, it does not mean that the better option would have happened. 

The Year 2013

However, many of us dwell on what we fear the most and if we dwell on it incessantly we can fool ourselves into believing it is a sure thing.    The emotion that we can feel in these cases is tiring. 

Mind you, I have to give some validity to this.  The news media is leading with the Fiscal Cliff in most newscasts.  It is some exquisite political drama, but it is also stressful because we do not know how it will affect us. 

From this point in the present we do not know what 2013 will bring.  While many events are possible,  I strangely take comfort in the idea of economic forecasting, which says the past will happen in the future.    There will be good and bad.  There will be good news and disappointment in our lives.   

Closing Thoughts. 

I think that it is your and my responsibility to take hold and give things meaning as we see fit.   As I get older, I find more and more opportunities to feel disappointment or feel worry.  As we get older we have the chance to see more and more nuances in the different life events which can create disappointment or worry.    Worry has never made me a better person and so the question is whether I will take those opportunities.  Not all opportunities are worth it because they do nothing to make us better.

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The future--don't get carried away worrying about it.

With the coming of the new year, people do contemplate and worry about what the new year will bring.  We're getting older, we may not have been satisfied or we were disappointed with 2011 . . . the list could go on as to why to dread the new year.

2011 has had its dread.  The Reverend Harold Camping made his two predictions.  Many are freaking out about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. 

Throughout my life, I have seen doom-sayer after doom-sayer make predictions and then crawl away after their 15 minutes of notoriety.  Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, there were countless people engaged in studying and rehashing prophecy about who was the anti-christ and when Jesus was coming back.

I am one of those people who have decided not to get carried away about how or when the world is going to end . . . at least now.   I find that too much emotion and not enough logic is behind all of those scares.  Perhaps I am cynical--no one is perfect.

When it comes down to it, I have to take a few cues from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.  There is nothing new under the sun--stuff comes around again.  All economic forecasting is basically a form of saying the past is going to be the future.   However, to me the most salient statement in Ecclesiastes is 7:14,

When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, a man cannot discover anything about his future. (NIV)

I think that the passages of the Bible indicate that people have always dreaded the future.  Some generations had more to dread than others. 

History is always a good teacher.  While nothing is guaranteed, the world has kept turning. 

Getting spiritual for a moment, there are a few things that believers in God can take comfort in.  There is a future and Jesus Christ is coming back. When is a mystery, but it will happen.  Until then you and I have a choice as to how we are to live--hopefully in the wisest possible way.

That being said, I blend in a secular statement from Wayne Dyer:

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there's nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.