Don’t dread the rain, you never know when it may end. Do your best to banish your anxiety of trivial things because you have no idea how they’ll actually play out.
It was a rainy day today and was going to stay like that all day, so of course I dreaded the walk I was going to have to take outside. The thought kept popping into my head as I sat and read during my treatment. I knew it would be fine in the end, it’d be a great act of Stoicism to walk in the rain, but I wasn’t hyped about it.
My other source of nervousness came from a phone call I needed to make. I opened a new savings account a few months ago and I’ve had nothing but issues with it. I was at the point was I was ready to close it down and find another account. I feared the call, because I planned to be more harsh than I’m used to in order to get my grievances across. As I went to make the call, my nerves were out of control and I could feel the tingling through my entire body.
Here’s the thing, when it was time to walk, the rain had stopped and it was a nice cool day. When I made the call, the representative I talked with was immensely friendly and helpful. So after all that anxiety and all that time thinking, both worked out better than I could’ve hoped.
There’s no way to predict how life is going to play out, but as humans, we always try to do so anyway. Unfortunately, the stories we create in our mind ted to be poor. We imagine all that could go wrong and how that’ll affect our life. We work ourselves up over the things that we have to do before we even do them and we freak ourselves out over the results that may not happen.
As hard as it is, when you have to do something, you can’t let your mind linger on what could go wrong. Thinking of the negatives will do nothing but lead to inaction and unnecessary anxiety. Don’t waste your time playing scenarios out in your mind. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen.
Take it moment by moment and trust you have all the tools under your belt to accomplish anything you need to do.
September 23, 2024
