Scare Tactics

  

    

"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy."  -Leo Buscaglia
(Or someone else.  I've seen this quote attributed to a number of people online...but I like Leo best of all the people who may or may not have said it.)

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     I've been noticing how much fear there is lately.  It seems to be lurking around every corner, in a million internet stories, smeared all over newsstands, and woven into a large percentage of the conversations I hear.  It's on people's faces as they board my flights (and even more so in the faces I can't see because they've got surgical masks on.)   

     The list of things we're afraid of right now is lengthy.  Most of them are legitimate things to be concerned about:  war, disease, terrorism, rising sea levels, tsunamis, fear-based regimes taking over countries...

     If we really spent a lot of time pondering all the things coming at us, we'd all end up in a corner of our closets in the fetal position afraid to come out.  

     But is it helpful in any way to go around being afraid? 

     I don't think so.  I know this because I've tried it.  I've been afraid of plenty of things through the years.  And being afraid of them didn't help me or anyone else.   

     One thing that's made me less fearful is age. Simply living through a lot of crap makes you more resilient.  There's a longer and longer list of things I, or people around me, have been afraid of....and survived.  So far I've lived through scares surrounding swine flu, bird flu, dengue fever, anthrax, sars, cholera, mad cow disease, meningitis, and I even remember people being fearful of handling blankets used by passengers with hiv.   Yes, I know that some of these acronyms are typically capitalized, but I like Louise Hays' thoughts on that:  Make it BIG...and you make it SCARY.  

     And that's the crux of the thing:  when you get scared you usually cut off your ability to think and act in ways to work through things.  Fear mainly gets us stuck.

     Yes, all of these diseases have caused some real devastation, but not to every single person who ever worried about them.  And it wasn't the worrying that saved them.   Worrying and fretting about a possible, potential, thing that might happen is truly pointless.  Worry can often bring to us exactly what we're afraid of.  In the case of scary diseases-the act of worrying actually undermines our immune systems.  

     Some of these diseases now have vaccines and drugs to fight the symptoms because people got active raising money, or doing research.  That's what helps.  Whenever there's a new fear on the horizon I try to do everything I can proactively do about it:  Donate to a campaign, vote, learn how to handle a particular calamity, wash my hands, avoid touching my face, learn what to do if I suspect there's someone on my flight with an illness, etc. 

     But then, I have to move on to other stuff.  

     It really is true that most of what we worry about never happens.  (It's the stuff that jumps out at us from nowhere that's really terrible. ) And what can we do about that?  Unfortunately, not a dang thing.

     What really, truly, personally, effects us, is losing someone we care about.  That's the thing that nothing can prepare us for.  But, worrying about that day coming or the millions of other potential causes for worry during that person's life won't make the end easier.  If we're at their deathbeds we can take comfort that we were happy together, that we did fun things, lived out our hopes and dreams...  

     We're not going to wish we'd collectively spent more time worrying and obsessing over every possible bad scenario that could have happened.   We'll be glad we lived the time we had.  I think that's also what will give us satisfaction looking back on our own lives.

     It's not that I never have a sleepless night thinking about things I can't control.  I do.  But less and less of them every year.  

     I've learned to consider the odds of some particular thing happening to me.  I've also learned to filter out some of the stuff that doesn't have anything to do with my life.  Just as an example:  I've trained myself not to look at the newsfeed my email provider slaps underneath my sign-in info.  They seem to scan the news of the entire world and find the most outrageously horrible things that ever happened to anyone.  

     These days my filters for listening to news are:  1- Is this happening to someone I know and care about?   2- Is there something I can do about this situation?  and 3- Do I need to know this so people won't think I'm completely clueless about the world?  (The last one's a bit of a cop-out...I don't have a passion for hearing play by play reports of all the agonies of our world...I find that drowns out all the triumphs around us.  But I do read The Skimm, etc. just to know what people are obsessed about today.)

     I also walk a tightrope with being concerned for others and empathizing...and being an enabler of gloom and fear.  I was on a crew van yesterday morning with a crew from another airline.  One woman was telling about how bad their contract was going to be, how a tree fell in her yard, (no one was hurt and it didn't fall on the house...but she went on and on about how she thought the tree service would rip her off and would probably take weeks to clear it away....) and another story so terrible that happened to a friend-of-a-friend of hers.  I won't share that one...waaaay too scary.  I'm trying really hard to block it from myself.  

     We were headed to work.  This woman looked defeated before she even got started.  I asked her if she'd had any good news lately.  She sat there for a second at a loss for words, then said:
"Oh-I have some great news!"  And she lit up telling about it:  "I ran into my older brother's best friend from high school this past spring.  I always had a crush on him.  He asked me out, and we've been dating for six months, and I'm absolutely crazy about him."  

     I think that's a better way to start the day.  Scaring ourselves to death with worst-case scenarios is not helpful for getting through the day.    

       I've noticed, too, that every generation, for all of recorded history, thought their world was going to hell in a hand basket.  And, in certain way, it was.  Every era has horrible, devastating events, as well as beautiful, uplifting, successes.  But I think it tends to be two steps forward, one step back.   Progress moves in fits and starts...but it does advance.  

     I think, as a whole, civilization is moving forward.  Less than a century ago most Americans didn't have indoor plumbing.  Almost no one had cars.  People died from a splinter getting infected because there were no antibiotics...  In a million ways our lives improve every day.  That's what I like to be most focused on.   I like to choose hope over fear, even if I have to make a new resolution to do that every single day.  

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"Worrying won't stop the bad stuff from happening it just stops you from enjoying the good." - Unknown

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What's the most hopeful/helpful/wonderful news you've heard today?