Emily Articulated: I worried

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I’m not sure exactly when I became a worrier. Maybe it was dormant throughout a tumultuous childhood and brazen, chaotic 20s. My worry couldn’t have been present when I drove my car across state lines just after getting my license or when I dropped out of college without a backup plan; when I booked one-way tickets to foreign places without knowing what I’d do or where I’d stay when I landed. It wasn’t there when I swapped hometowns like used sweaters and tried on careers like new ones.

But maybe worry was always there, buried beneath the detritus of movement and self-inflicted upheaval. It’s hard to worry when there’s only time for action. It took settling in a beautiful mountain town — finding stillness and contentment — for it to finally have room to grow. Decades of suppressed worry now demand near-continuous mindfulness to keep at bay.

One part of that mindful maintenance is regularly revisiting Mary Oliver’s poem, “I Worried.” It begins: “I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it?”

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

Being a person on this planet is cause enough for crippling worry. Our collision course with destruction has been set by billionaire oligarchs, dictators and those who aspire to be them, with every headline confirming our worst fears about where we’re headed and who will be sacrificed to slake their insatiable thirst for power. As scientists scream, “Action now!” we take inverse action. As philanthropists cry, “Who next?” we line up the vulnerable for bulldozing. As locals grumble, “That too?” another price tag is attached to something precious.

I raise Mary’s questions with my own: Will the planet survive? Will we start another war? Will smoke choke out our July and August? Will our town’s heart be crushed beneath yet another block of luxury condominiums?

Her poem continues: “Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless.”

Being a person among people means we can always do better. Every interaction is an opportunity — to be kind, to be funny, to uplift; to be a good listener, a good storyteller, a good resource. But it’s also an opportunity to let busyness or anxiousness or our own bandwidth get in the way of showing up as we want to, as we know we should. We can continually let each other down, fail to do enough, neglect to reach back from our place in the world and lift someone else up to meet us.

Even if we get it right 90% of the time, we still let 10% of the people we see slip by when we could have made a difference. We can always do better. We can always strive to be the best version of ourselves, yet we can only be the version of ourselves that we are capable of at this moment in time. We can only do what we can.

I ask: Did I do enough? Did I make a difference? Did I pay attention? Did I care like I should; like I want to?

Mary continues: “Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?”

Being a person with a body means being something with an expiration date. It means needing to be aware enough to advocate for our health, to live and do the things we dream of — but not so aware that we’re paralyzed by all the ways this miracle of a body might fail, all the ways we might meet our inevitable end.

I ask: Will I get to grow old? Is that wrinkle new? What is that pain? Is there more I could do?

The poem concludes: “Finally, I saw that worrying came to nothing. And I gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.”

Finally, I see that it’s normal to worry — not to suppress it, nor to live inside it, but to acknowledge its presence, its reason for being there, and let it go. I can take action on the things I can change. And for the things I cannot, I can seek the antidotes I know to be a cure: connection, kindness to myself and others, beauty, joy and love.

I say: I worried, yet I persisted. I worried, and I decided to live fully, anyhow.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.