Why Worry?

I received an email last night which was a Power Point slide which really touched me and made me think.

Is it just human nature that makes us worry?  And the more worldly possessions we have, does that make us worry more?

I have been in the situation where I have lost my favourite worldly possessions on more than one occasion, and it taught me a serious lesson, never to have a favourite possession because as soon as you favour something you end up losing it or it breaks or something happens to it.

With Ireland being in the throes of a recession / depression, with taxes going up, you wonder how you are able to cope and most of us will worry about how we are going to pay the bills, but I guess we do manage. 

Lately I have been thinking about my childhood and growing up, I remember my parents constantly worrying about the bills, it was the 70’s in South Africa and we lived in a middle class suburb on the “poorer” side of town.  I don’t ever remember getting shop bought clothes, they were always made by the dress maker out of crimplene – but how times have changed.  Dress makers are sort after skills and these days it would cost more to have a dress custom made than to buy it in a shop.

We never had luxury holidays, I remember in Standard 2 one of the guys in my class his father was a doctor and when we got back from our summer holidays we all had a turn to tell the class what we had done over the summer holidays, and he had been on a family holiday to Mauritius and gone on a glass bottom boat, wow that was back in 1973 – I only managed to do the Mauritius trip in 1994, but I still got to do it.

Times were hard but my mother and father had both been through the war, so not having was not unusual for them, however they would have been in the situation where they would have been wealthy and then lost it all and had to cope with that, in that case you would think what could you have done differently to prevent it happening.   Had my father not made the decisions he did regarding his construction company and had he not been swindled out of thousands of pounds in the 60’s where would I be today?

But as the saying from the 1800’s goes “if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands”, so we deal with our situation as it is – worrying creates Stress, which can lead to heart attacks and stroke and of course medical costs.  So how does one stop stressing about the costs and the bills and everything else in life? 

It’s easy to say “why are you worried at least you have a roof over your head and food and clothes” etc.  Yes there are people worse off than me, why look at all those property investors who are now millions in debt, but the tax payer is bailing them out and the banks who loaned them the money.  If I can’t pay my bills, who is going to bail me out?  

I have decided though for my health I am going to stop worrying because it isn’t doing my health any good and I can’t control the future so I just have to live each day at a time and come what may!  "!Que sera sera"

I went totally off the subject of the power point slide, but it basically has pictures of people from 3^rd world countries and us comparing what we don’t have and looking at their strife, for instance showing how children in modern countries won’t eat their vegetables’ and then showing a starving child somewhere in Africa, and so it goes on showing the sad plight of others and how lucky we are to have what we have.