I can avoid being late, but I cannot avoid the suffering of potentially being late. I have my limits. Predicting the future is one of them, though I refuse to let that stop me.
That said, it occurred to me today that when I stress over being late, it’s because my mind has sent an advance team into the future to find out what might go wrong if I were late, and instead of bringing back information, they’ve brought back suffering, delivered directly to my doorstep, like the DoorDash of dismay.
And the dumb thing is, when I finally get there, things aren’t usually as bad as my advance team said they would be. In fact, sometimes nothing bad happens at all, yet I’ve already suffered as if it has.
You’d think after all these years, I’d have noticed that my advance team has a horrible track record. They keep warning me about disasters that never happen, and I keep believing them. I mean, how many times does someone have to be wrong before you stop taking their advice?
And yet, here I am running around in a panic, treating their predictions like eyewitness accounts.
I think that’s what finally got to me today. I wasn’t responding to something that had happened. I was responding to something I imagined might happen, as though imagining it made it inevitable.
And for all my efforts to avoid an uncomfortable future, I was making myself uncomfortable in the present. Real smart!
The reality is that I’m not preparing for suffering, I’m practicing it. And those are two very different things.
Preparation is useful, sure. It does useful stuff like put the address into my GPS before I get into the car.
Worrying, on the other hand, does un-useful stuff like create a dystopian future in which I am humiliated for being late, disappointed for missing out, and frustrated for not doing what I wanted to do.
So preparation helped me get there, but worry made me suffer along the way.
I’m not saying that being late never has real consequences, but my suffering in advance doesn’t make any of those things less likely or less uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, my brain is infatuated with trying to manage an outcome that hasn’t come. It likes being a fortune teller. And I’ve been thinking of myself as a particularly gifted one.
But I’m beginning to suspect that guessing what’s going to happen isn’t actually a prerequisite for living through it.
Which means I can be late without being ruined.
I can disappoint someone without being a disappointment.
And I can experience an uncomfortable moment without spending the hour before it being uncomfortable, too.
These aren’t particularly revolutionary ideas. But I’m sixty years old, and just now considering them.
Maybe that’s because I’ve spent so much of my life assuming that if I could just see enough trouble coming, I could keep it from coming. As though my ability to predict the future were the thing holding my life together.
That’s an awful lot of responsibility to give someone who can’t even predict whether she’ll hit a red light.
I need to remind myself that I am not nearly as powerful as my anxiety seems to think I am. I can’t predict every problem, prevent every disappointment, or protect myself from every uncomfortable moment. I've spent too much time trying to do a job that requires omniscience and omnipotence. And frankly, my performance reviews haven't been great. I think it’s time to resign.
P.S. More on this in my forthcoming book, The Divine Takeover. Coming soon. As soon as I finish writing it.