This week I reflect on the trait I have in excess, an ability to worry. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism, but I take some foolish pride in being rarely, though sometimes, surprised by good or bad news. Yet I also have the trait of endlessly calculating future events, spinning in my mind the negative and positive outcomes possible. It's a good thing,I think, to foresee outcomes. But the emotions that go with it can be so debilitating and absurd.
I love about myself that I can sometimes take subtle indicators and read from them things I need to know. This helps me with my work,and helps me sometimes have an almost psychic sense of what is going to happen next.
Yet the flipside of this is an "ability" to infer far more from things than the things themselves imply. Rather than helping me intuit the situation, this impedes my ability to accurately perceive.
I have an essential exuberance about things sometimes, which sometimes manifests itself--which runs a bit against the grain of my ordinarily placid approach to things. When something interests me, I tend to be exuberant about it--be it a conversation or a chess game. My interior life is always quite active,but it rarely affects my outer affect. I find that social settings bring out my daydreaming prediction of things in greater abundance, with very mixed results.
But it amuses, puzzles and intrigues me when I am at one of those intersections in which adrenaline and worry collide. It's not that in such situations I mis-perceive everything. It's that in such situations I see some things as they are, and as to other things, I worry when worry is unnecessary. Fortunately, this is not a work issue, but it sometimes gets me slightly astray on non-work matters.
I learn from such times. I learn to slow down and just breathe. I learn to accept that sometimes letting "inferences" race away with me
will lead me to feeling foolish or even acting in a constricted, foolish way. I learn not to read too much into words, and even less into silences. A zen moment? Not quite. But perhaps a pleasurable pause.
In such times, I find myself apologizing for things I have not done, and, worse, needing to apologize for things I do not fully realize but intuit. I learn to accept that my skills in such matters are imperfect. I learn to accept that this set of flaws teach me to be mindful, and more in the moment. But still, I amuse myself, because I have that exquisite and horribly awkward sense of worry giving me a roller-coaster sensation that fills idle hours.
Perhaps this is why sometimes I am tempted towards silence about things I feel and imagine--because I mistrust that worry. Yet I find as the years go on that I am now more accustomed to showing what I think and feel, and just accepting that it brings with it the adventure of worry.