Quit Your Worrying! | Page 4

George Wharton James
and sets his feet on the
pathway to destruction.
Why is it that creatures endowed with reason distress themselves and

everyone around them by worrying? It might seem reasonable for the
wild creatures of the wood--animals without reason--to worry as to how
they should secure their food, and live safely with wilder animals and
men seeking their blood and hunting them; but that men and women,
endued with the power of thought, capable of seeing the why and
wherefore of things, should worry, is one of the strange and peculiar
evidences that our so-called civilization is not all that it ought to be.
The wild Indian of the desert, forest, or canyon seldom, if ever, worries.
He is too great a natural philosopher to be engaged in so foolish and
unnecessary a business. He has a better practical system of life than has
his white and civilized (!) brother who worries, for he says: Change
what can be changed; bear the unchangeable without a murmur. With
this philosophy he braves the wind and the rain, the sand, and the storm,
the extremes of heat and cold, the plethora of a good harvest or the
famine of a drought. If he complains it is within himself; and if he
whines and whimpers no one ever hears him. His face may become a
little more stern under the higher pressure; he may tighten his waist belt
a hole or two to stifle the complaints of his empty stomach, but his
voice loses no note of its cheeriness and his smile none of its sweet
serenity.
Why should the rude and brutal (!) savage be thus, while the cultured,
educated, refined man and woman of civilization worry wrinkles into
their faces, gray hairs upon their heads, querelousness into their voices
and bitterness into their hearts?
When we use the word "worry" what do we mean? The word comes
from the old Saxon, and was in imitation of the sound caused by the
choking or strangling of an animal when seized by the throat by another
animal. We still refer to the "worrying" of sheep by dogs--the seizing
by the throat with the teeth; killing or badly injuring by repeated biting,
shaking, tearing, etc. From this original meaning the word has enlarged
until now it means to tease, to trouble, to harass with importunity or
with care or anxiety. In other words it is undue care, needless anxiety,
unnecessary brooding, fretting thought.
What a wonderful picture the original source of the word suggests of

the latter-day meaning. Worry takes our manhood, womanhood, our
high ambitions, our laudable endeavors, our daily lives, by the throat,
and strangles, chokes, bites, tears, shakes them, hanging on like a wolf,
a weasel, or a bull-dog, sucking out our life-blood, draining our
energies, our hopes, our aims, our noble desires, and leaving us torn,
empty, shaken, useless, bloodless, hopeless, and despairing. It is the
nightmare of life that rides us to discomfort, wretchedness, despair, and
to that death-in-life that is no life at all. It is the vampire that sucks out
the good of us and leaves us like the rind of a squeezed-out orange; it is
the cooking-process that extracts and wastes all the nutritious juices of
the meat and leaves nothing but the useless and tasteless fibre.
Worry is a worse thief than the burglar or highwayman. It goes beyond
the train-wrecker or the vile wretch who used to lure sailing vessels
upon a treacherous shore, in its relentless heartlessness. Once it begins
to control it never releases its hold unless its victim wakes up to the
sure ruin that awaits him and frees himself from its bondage by making
a great, continuous, and successful fight.
It steals the joy of married life, of fatherhood and motherhood; it
destroys social life, club life, business life, and religious life. It robs a
man of friendships and makes his days long, gloomy periods, instead of
rapidly-passing epochs of joy and happiness. It throws around its
victim a chilling atmosphere as does the iceberg, or the snow bank; it
exhales the mists and fogs of wretchedness and misunderstanding; it
chills family happiness, checks friendly intercourse, and renders the
business occupations of life curses instead of blessings.
Worry manifests itself in a variety of ways. It is protean in its
versatility. It can be physical or mental. The hypochondriac conceives
that everything is going to the "demnition bow-wows." Nothing can
reassure him. He sees in every article of diet a hidden fiend of
dyspepsia; in every drink a demon of torture. Every man he meets is a
scoundrel, and every woman a leech. Children are growing worse daily,
and society is "rotten." The Church is organized for the mere fattening
of a raft of preachers and parsons who preach what they don't believe
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