How does worry take root?
The mind is trained to record only negative things. Even when something joyful happens, you remember only the moment when it ended, never the moments when you felt joy. The mind is trained from a very young age to think that life moves from one worry to the other or from one pain to another, never from one joy to another.
Worry takes root from your own thoughts or words. There are two things that continuously happen in you. The first is dialogue, and the second is monologue or what I call ‘inner chatter’. You either talk to people outside or you continuously chatter within you. In any case, words and thoughts are the ‘building blocks’ that make up worry.
When you speak to others, what you say is strictly governed by societal rules. You automatically don’t use prohibited or ‘politically incorrect’ words. But what you say inside yourself, no one except you knows. The thoughts that you generate inside constitute your real worries.
Khalil Gibran*, a Lebanese poet, beautifully says, ‘You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts!’ and ‘Our very verbalization is because we are not able to handle ourselves peacefully within us.’
It is like this: there is a continuous current of chatter happening in you twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. From this current a few spikes rise. These spikes are what you feel and express as worries. Worries are nothing but spikes in the current of thoughts constantly moving within you.
These thoughts are mostly negative. That’s the problem. If I ask you to write your life story in a few pages, you will write a few incidents highlighting how and when you struggled. You will not highlight the many joyful incidents that happened in between. The mind is trained to record only negative things. Even when something joyful happens, you remember only the moment when it ended, never the moments when you felt joy. Because even when you are at the peak of joy, you are always worrying about
when the joy will end! The mind is trained from a very young age to think that life moves from one worry to the other or from one pain to another, never from one joy to another.
In a classroom, the teacher found that one boy was sitting with a very sad face.
She asked him, ‘What happened? Why do you look so worried?’
The boy said, ‘It’s my parents. My dad works all day to provide good clothes and an excellent education for me. He buys me anything I want. My mother cooks the best food for me and takes care of me from morning until I go to bed.’
The teacher asked, ‘Then what is your problem? Why are you worried?’
The boy replied, ‘I am afraid they may run away.’
The mind has a clear identity only with pain, never with joy! That is why recalling even joyful moments becomes painful.
Joy never gets recorded as thoughts, but pain does. That’s why our internal recordings are always negative thoughts. Joy is like a blank recording! For example, if your entire life is like a time shaft, on that shaft the joyful moments are simply empty spaces! There won’t be any recording corresponding to it. But the moments of worry and suffering will be clearly recorded as black impressions.
On a beautiful white wall if there is a small black dot, and I ask you what you are able to see, what will you say? You will say you only see the black dot. You will not see the big white space surrounding it! That is how you conclude that your time shaft is only made up of worry and suffering.
Glossary:
* Khalil Gibran – Lebanese American poet best known for his ‘The Prophet’
Related Articles
What is Love? Posted on: October 27, 2012
What is ego? Posted on: May 27, 2012
Using the right mask Posted on: May 27, 2012
Types of ego Posted on: June 8, 2012
Three types of Love and their integration Posted on: July 23, 2012