The Language of Worry

A Meditation and Reflection from October, 2023

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

In my work as a professor at a university teeming with ambitious students, I have learned to speak the language of worry. Students come to my office and sit and communicate their concerns about the world they’re entering, with wars and carnage unfolding in all its quarters, events they are reminded of with every news update and social media conversation. They are entering a world of nuclear proliferation, economic strain, and environmental collapse. It is natural to worry. The mind worries like the stomach growls.

Nevertheless all this worrying will lead us into a spiral of panic and upset. And for nothing, since we hardly ever worry about the things that actually happen to us. We worry so we can front bad events off at the pass. Yet the bad events don’t come as we imagine them; they’re always a little different, a little altered in the light of day. Or they don’t show up at all. Other events, bad and good, take their places. Worry, in its way, then is like trying to get what you want by imagining what you don’t want. When I say it this way, I think of the wisdom of Paramahansa Yogananda, who described an old swami writing in the dust, “Don’t do what you want, and you can do as you like.” The bizarre truth is that when we forget what we want, and we look at the space in front of us with mindfulness and respond to that alone, we are free.

My dear friend, the late writer Kermit Moyer, quoted E.L. Doctorow all the time. When he was asked about how to write a novel, Doctorow used to say: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. The headlights only shine so far, but you can make the whole journey that way.” He was really talking about mindfulness. We may worry about what will happen when we reach a certain cavern or cross a certain bridge, or what the weather will be like when we hit Lincoln, Nebraska, but there is only one thing we can really know. The headlights will be there. Awareness will be there. My only requirement is to follow the thread of those headlights, responding to what comes.

I have spoken of William Stafford’s (1914-1993) reputation as a plain poet of the Plains. He wrote a poem every morning before dawn, starting in the years after 1946. He’d spent the war as a conscientious objector and was placed in the Civilian Public Service camps engaged in forestry and soil conservation throughout the South and in the West. From 1954 until his death, he lived in Oregon and taught at a small college, and he gave scads of readings across the United States. But in his humble notions about the way things are, he was always the placid man from Kansas.

Rilke once said we should wait a long time before the first words of poetry are spoken. He would have approved of Stafford, then, who was 48 when his first book was published in 1963. Traveling through the Dark may have arrived late in his life, but it wasted no time in finding readers. It won the National Book Award the following year. You hear in the book's title the confrontation with uncertainty that became a strong theme in his poetry over the three decades hence. An older man of contained, terse speech, a teacher with a family, William Stafford did not fit the wild image of the poet that the Beat generation had modeled just a few years earlier. He seemed a revolutionary against the revolutionaries; he followed his own thread; he belonged to no school, not really. All the while, readers cleave to his words.

The Way It Is

By William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

“There’s a Thread You Follow” is a poem about worry. It’s about other things, too, but the notion of giving up worry seems a powerful theme here. Letting go of what ifs. It seeks to define reality by pulling away the strands of impermanence that tangle and obscure the obvious.

The poem asks us to let go, too, of what others might say about our thread. When we’re holding it, we “can’t get lost.” We don’t need to seek advice or gain approval. We would walk anywhere the thread leads us to. When I was offered a teaching job in the Czech Republic, having made a cold call to a foundation, sitting there in my cubicle in Boston, I said yes without hesitation—surprising even myself—and a month later was jetting over the Atlantic to meet the rest of my life. These major shifts don't happen every day, but they re-orient for better daily contact with presence and acceptance in the interim.

The thread has no beginning or ending. We just tag along for the ride while we’re here. There’s no arc or climax or even any hidden meaning other than following awareness where it takes us.

The poem is so rich because it says, plainly and confidently, the obvious thing. Whatever this thread is to each of us, when we are holding it and following it, we are our smartest selves. We will always know, as they say in the rooms of twelve step programs, “the next right thing to do.” While bad things are bound to happen, the thread doesn’t protect you or preclude you from getting hurt. Rather, it leads you into and through these periods of uncertainty and pain. This awareness is our way of seeing the pain for what it is, and like it did for the Buddha, very often it can turn the arrows into flowers.

Oars for the Boat

There is one thing that’s real. It moves among things that change. We simply follow what can’t change. What is your name for that? That’s the thread. That’s the headlights. No matter what happens, awareness will be there, looking at the things that pass. Follow the thread through this moment to the next. Where is it located in your body? Where are the headlights and what are they shining on to lead you, moment by moment, to awareness, to good choices that will not be, necessarily, what you “want,” but which will lead you to do “as you like?”

All religions and traditions seem to agree on this one thing. Don’t worry. Blessed Pio, a Catholic Saint of the 20^th century said, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry. Worry is useless.” In Judaism the notion of bitachon is translated as “trust,” and is described as an inspired confidence that comes mysteriously from God. Twelve Step programs instruct us to “just do the next right thing.” They assume we will always know what the next “right thing” is, but not necessarily ten paces down the road. One step at a time, they instruct us. Follow the thread. The poet John Keats used the term “negative capability” to speak of one’s “ability to be among uncertainties without any irritating grasping toward logic or reason.” Rumi, the medieval Sufi mystic, said, “Don’t worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know the side you’re used to is better than the one to come?”

Stafford wrote about writing in the way that my writing brought me to mindfulness practices. His great collection of essays is still available today: Writing the Australian Crawl. He writes, “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.”