Respect The Dangers In Your Mind

I knew a man who had a heart attack. His doctor told him, “You have to let go of some stress. If you don’t, you’re going to die.” At first, the man wasn’t sure this was possible. How do you just will yourself not to be stressed? But to his surprise, he noticed that, now, when a worry would come, he’d think of his doctor and the stint in his own heart, and fearing for his life, he’d change the channel in his head, by any means necessary.

The moral of the story is that worrying is a choice. It’s not always a conscious choice, of course, for like any other addiction, anxiety can blind us to the damage we’re doing to our bodies and minds. That’s why we often have to hit “rock bottom” before we see our agency in worrying and take back our power.

For some, this rock bottom is a physical condition, as it was for my friend. For others, it’s an awareness of death and how much life gets wasted on worrying. Sometimes youth, intelligence, or conceit can delay the process of hitting bottom. But somehow, some way, we all have to feel the damage anxiety causes to our immune systems, relationships, life-visions, and ability to love and serve humanity.

The Buddha said that patience is the highest discipline. In our culture, we tend to pursue discipline anxiously, trying to get our bodies, minds, and careers to the next level as quickly as possible. But that’s ambition, not discipline, and it will cause you to hurt yourself, not improve.

The highest discipline is to see that the future is not here yet, that obsessing over it is an intoxication for which we pay dearly, and that just because you walk past a thousand worries every day doesn’t mean you have to pick them up and carry them.

Inner peace isn’t our birthright. It’s not the case that we will inherit serenity some day, no matter what we do. Peace comes from vigilance, restraint, and a healthy respect for the dangers in your own mind.