Worrying About the Future: On Trusting in Uncertainty
by Lori Deschene
“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.”
~Eckhart Tolle
The other day my good friend from back home called me
hysterically crying. She felt certain she just blew a second job
interview, and she’d hit a breaking point.
She’d been struggling for months, just barely paying her bills
and wondering if she could afford to keep her apartment.
Every purchase had become an exercise in extreme deliberation.
In fact, I’m fairly certain that when I visited last, I saw her
stressing in the grocery store about whether she really needed that
box of Twinkies that beckoned from the shelf.
Now here she was, hyperventilating, recounting in explicit
detail all the things she’d done wrong in this interview.
The interviewer looked disgusted, she said—he was probably
thinking she was incompetent. He asked her questions in an abrupt
way—he was trying to trip her up. He didn’t respond when she made
conversation on the way to the door—he most likely hated her and
couldn’t wait to get rid of her.
Having gone through countless interviews with multiple companies
after sending out dozens of resumes, she was just plain exhausted
and starting to feel desperate.
As she recalled the anxiety she felt in this encounter, I
visualized her sitting vulnerably in front of his desk, and my
heart went out to her. I imagined she felt a lot like Tom Smykowski
from Office Space when he was interviewing with the efficiency
experts to save his job—pre-Jump-to-Conclusions mat.
“I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have
to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t
you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people!?”
Twenty minutes out of the pressure cooker, she was drowning in
fears about what it would mean to not get an offer. She may have to
move back in with her parents. She’d need to ask her also
unemployed boyfriend for financial help. She’d have to develop a
taste for spam, ramen noodles, or maybe even cat food.
Worst of all, when she inevitably failed, she’d have to
acknowledge it was all her fault for blowing this interview.
About 10 minutes in, I realized that comforting her was not an
option.
She didn’t believe me when I told her she’d done her best and
she shouldn’t be hard on herself. She felt sure there was no other
way to look at the situation; the interviewer was sitting in his
office stroking his handlebar mustache laughing maniacally about
the inept woman he had no intention of hiring.
She was talking herself in circles, alternating between
statements of certainty—that all had been lost—and asking me what I
thought might happen—as if perhaps there was still hope if only an
outsider would verify it often enough.
But whenever I suggested that it’s never over until it’s over,
she plummeted back into prophetic despair, convinced her inadequacy
only allowed for one disappointing outcome.
Just then, between tears and speculative conclusions, call
waiting beeped in. She got the job.
I could feel her immense relief. From 3,000 miles away, I felt
her heart rate slow down, her erratic thinking simmer, and her
narrow vision of doom expand into a blend of shock, euphoria, and
excited anticipation.
I felt it all along with her. I’d been an accomplice to her
panic attack, after all.
As I thought about how unnecessary all of the worrying had
been—and how I wished she didn’t put herself through that—I
realized I’d been in her shoes before. There have been many times
when I’ve felt overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, and
desperate to feel some type of control.
There have been times when I’ve asked people for their opinions
and then felt unsatisfied until I heard exactly what I wanted to
hear. When I’ve made assumptions about negative things to come, and
then obsessed over what I could do to prevent it, or what I should
have done to avoid it.
In retrospect, all that mental busy work did very little to
change what was coming.
It wasn’t even slightly useful or productive, and it definitely
didn’t soften the blow if my fears came true and something went
wrong or didn’t pan out.
In fact, it only exacerbated the situation because worrying
essentially began the disappointment retroactively.
If you worry and nothing’s wrong, you’ve wasted precious time
over nothing. If you worry and something is wrong, you’ve still
wasted precious time.
Every time we use the present to stress about the future, we’re
choosing to sacrifice joy today to mourn joy we might not have
tomorrow. It may seem like we’re creating solutions or somehow
protecting ourselves from pain, but in all reality, we’re just
causing ourselves more of it.
Perhaps the key is to challenge that instinctive sense of fear
we feel when we start thinking about uncertainty. When I look back
at the most fulfilling parts of my life, I realize most of them
took me completely by surprise.
I may not have gotten everything I wanted, but I’ve wanted what
I’ve gotten more than often enough to compensate. The unknown may
have provided some heartache, but it’s also provided adventure and
excitement.
For every time I’ve felt disappointed, there’s been another
moment when I’ve felt a sense of wonder. Those are the moments we
live for—when all of a sudden we see the world through new eyes in
a way we could never have known to predict.
Uncertainty is the cost of that deeply satisfying, exhilarating,
spontaneous sense of awe.
It would be easy to say that mindfulness is the answer to
worrying. If you’re truly immersed in the present moment, there
wouldn’t be any reason to fixate on what might be coming. But I
suspect that it’s inevitable we’ll do that from time to time. We’re
only human, after all.
Maybe a better suggestion is a combination of being in the
moment and trusting in the one to follow.
We can’t always control what it will look like, but we can know
that more often than not, it will lead to something good if we’re
open to it. When it doesn’t, we’ll get through it—and faster if we
haven’t already overwhelmed ourselves with what-ifs and worst-case
scenarios.
On the other side of worry, there’s trust. We can’t always trust
in specifics, but we can trust in ourselves.
I 
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/worrying-about-the-f…
