I have recently observed that I am very pessimistic. I worry about my son dying of SIDS (chance: 50 of 100,000). I worry about the car falling off the edge of the mountain as we drive around sharp corners. I worry about a rock piercing the car tire and leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere. (Can a rock even do that?)
And yet, as Boyd K. Packer said (Ensign, November 1977),
Somewhere there is a message in the protest of a man who said: “You can’t tell me worry doesn’t help. The things I worry about never happen.”
By extension, then, the things I do not worry about do happen.
This is our garage ceiling the day before we left town for our Christmas vacation:
![IMG_6265LR[1]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7061/6857757551_8941e72b83_m.jpg)
Apparently, three days of spring rain flowed through a leak in our roof. The buildup of water subsequently leaked through the ceiling and collapsed through the dry wall in a big gush of water.
There has been another Disaster recently, this one involving a litre of vegetable oil in the trunk of the car. I don’t want to talk about it.
Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether or not I agonize about it first. I really ought to let go. Life will be more pleasant. And then I wont be afraid to live and take chances. (My “chances” will be within reason, of course. I am still me, after all; I am conservative in the risks I take.) I need to be realistic in the things I think about and concern myself with what is important.
Therefore, my first New Years goal is to not worry. I promise I won’t post pessimistic things on this webpage. And I’m going to let go of my worries. It’s time I embrace optimism or, at the very least, realism.
When you were an infant, you slept so quietly that I sometimes worried about whether or not you were breathing. My good friend Lynn Fleming–not a member of the church–said she didn’t think those fears were coming from the Holy Spirit. That really helped me to realize that I needed to ask myself where the feelings were coming from. Sometimes when you worry about something (Your daughter riding on a hypothetical motorcycle to California with the hypothetical family gas station attendant named Dred) you are absolutely right to listen! Other times, you just learn from experience to be careful what rolls around in the trunk. (I once drove around with a gallon of apple cider dripping out of the trunk of my car. It took a while to work its way through the system, and people kept telling me I had a gas leak.)
Just to set the record straight, I asked to go to Vegas with my druggie friend named “Dred” in the hopes that after mom said no, she’d think it was simply fantastic that I wanted to get my cartilage pierced.
And about worrying: Chris and I had a conversation the other day about this. He was afraid that since Leah was getting taller, she’d figure out how to open the window in her bedroom and climb out and fall to her death 2 stories below. I reminded him that there were a million ways she could get hurt and that we shouldn’t worry about the unrealistic ones. Later that day, I expressed my concern that Leah (who likes to hang from door knobs, chairs, and countertops) would try to hang from the new shelf we put up that was within her reach, and pull it off the wall…he recited the same speech to me that I’d given him. I guess my point is that some accidents can be avoided and are worth worrying about it you haven’t protected your child from it adequately (which is why we use car seats, for example), and some are just not worth worrying about because it will get you nowhere.
End of epic novel.
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