worrying

 

There is always something to worry about. Something to double check, something to put off for later, something to let fester fully aware it will bite you in the ass later. There are worries that feel inescapable, and worries that make you questions whether you are doing it to yourself. There’s little that evidence of things turning out mostly okay does for you in the face of worrying. I’ve mostly stumbled through life with no specific sense of purpose. It seems to have got me into a not unenviable position, but I am still mostly afraid of what lies ahead. I sometimes find it laughable how a life you have to reduce – in description – to grand generalisations has to be lived mostly as a series of immediate crises. While I prepare for my third move in less than a year, the most pressing things on my mind have almost nothing to do with it. The compromise then is to spend every spare moment worrying in the narrative voice of the opening of a documentary on climate change.

I saw a post recently said that something like “from a very early age, it was too late for me.” It speaks to a constant sense of running out of time that I do not think I am alone in feeling. I remember reading in Knight’s book that the Prophet had talked about the Quran being revealed to be read in a solemn sadness. That is the general sense with which I am able to take what comes. This year, I promised myself radical sincerity; I think I have been reasonably faithful to it. My sincerity, I think, comes only with a measure of this solemn sadness. Prospective worrying and retrospective rumination are maybe my only ways of looking at things, enveloped by a pervading but not inescapable sense of sadness. Like I said to a friend once about having loved ones all over the place, what it feels like I am really doing in peppering painful goodbyes here and there just to remind myself what this is all about. In the process of dealing with a series of immediate crises, I have also received a collection of incalculable love.