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A few months ago, on April 19, I couldn’t sleep. I was extremely worried. My mind was all over the place. So I grabbed my handy dandy BlackBerry (which as most people know, is rarely more than a foot away from me) and I wrote down everything that was worrying me. The note was entitled “Concerns/Worries, 4.19.10”, and I separated my worries into three different categories. I’m a very visual person, and my thinking was that typing it all out would help to organize my thoughts, so that I could sleep, and/or that it would show me that there really wasn’t that much to be concerned about, and/or that what I was concerned about really wasn’t so monumental.
The next night (April 20), I copied and pasted that list and “edited” it. I was able, in less than 24 hours, to delete four items from the largest category (my tweet). Interesting, huh? Just goes to show that usually, there is no reason to waste time worrying about some things…most things. Our minds are so powerful and we have this amazing ability to blow things way out of proportion. I revisited/edited the list again five days later (April 25), and in classic Sharmaine fashion, I deleted one worry from one category, but added three to the first one, the very same one from which I had deleted four just five days prior!! SMH (that stands for “shaking my head”, for those who don’t know)
Fast forward a little more than a month, on June 11, and I just happened to be scrolling through my notes in “MemoPad” (BlackBerry app) and I came across these lists, and lo and behold, I was able to delete all but one.
All.
But.
One.
And truth be told, that one wasn’t even a true “worry”. It was and is something that is on my mind, but it’s ALWAYS on my mind. It’s a constant struggle for me, and perhaps that will be revealed in a future blog post. Perhaps.
Putting a face on worry definitely helped me, and chronicling it is even more valuable. Maybe it will help someone else. I now keep the “real” lists in my Google Docs, so that I can go back and look at them later if I need to. But this video alone shows how pointless most of our worrying is. Am I past my worrying days? Ha!!! Not at all. I’m the queen of worrying and stressing for no real reason. I know this, and I’m not proud, because honestly, it just shows how weak my faith is. I can admit that.
Can you?