Tomorrow’s Problems

When I was a kid, we sometimes had some weird folk over, and we sometimes visited them. One time, we visited this weird guy (nice though, but weird) and he said “Excuse me, I’m just going to have my evening meal” and buggered off downstairs to have dinner with his wife and left us (his guests) upstairs, hungry. Now we thought this was just an English thing, but he wasn’t English.

You go to a Pakistani house, or an Arab house, or the house of just about anyone with strong Eastern or Middle Eastern heritage still coursing through their veins and you’re not leaving hungry, it would be considered exceptionally inhospitable. Anyway, like I said, weird.

He was a pretty wise old guy though, always smiling, always positive, never had a negative word to say. So one day I asked him, “Doctor” (he probably wasn’t a doctor, probably some fake doc, you know the kind, he was a fortune teller, tea-leaves, palm-reading, that kind of thing, but my mum called him “Doctor”) “how do you manage to look so young?” to which he answered without hesitation “I never bring the worry of tomorrow into today”

I’ve got a lot to worry about, but I try to live by that now. Living in day-tight compartments is hard, but doable. It’s a lot easier if you acknowledge the problem that you will likely face and instead of worrying about it, work on a contingency plan. The Stoics had an exercise for that, even for the worst case scenario, you know, the whole “Memento Mori” thing.

What if you can’t get things done today though?

Well, there is absolutely no point being stressed about the things that you didn't manage to get done by the end of the day.

The set of things that are not yet done is infinite. It is therefore insane to feel disappointed that you were not able to make a dent on infinity. Focus on the finite, preferably the minute. The smaller your scope of focus, the bigger an effect you can have.

Look, they nearly sorted fusion out recently, but they weren’t trying to do it with the mass of a sun, but a lemon pip. And they nearly cracked it.

See if you can bring your focus to bear on the tiniest aspect of a forthcoming problem and just have a crack at that. I did that yesterday and it helped me get rid of ten days of worry. Try your own fusion, and remember, don’t bring the worry of tomorrow into today”