Self-help principle #4:
Treat your life as a series of 24-hour units -- not as one long continuum.Suppose someone invited you to spend time today clasping the positive and negative terminals of your car battery, just for the pain of it. Just so you can feel the jolt and watch the shower of sparks. I doubt there would be many takers. The shock would ruin your day, and possibly your battery.
Most people have no appetite for such self-torture, at least not in such an overt form. They prefer the veiled variety: worry. For millions, it's the misery of choice.
Worry strips away the joys of today. It reaches into the unforeseeable future and takes out a loan on trouble, trouble that may or may not occur. "He who fears what he may suffer," says an old proverb, "already suffers what he fears." And what he or she fears usually doesn't even come to pass, making the suffering of worry entirely gratuitous.
Of course, most worriers admit that there is no logic in worry. But they feel powerless to shut it off. Like water from a broken pipe, the worry just gushes as they look on. Such passivity, however, is self-defeating and deceptive. We can do something. And while we may not be able to halt worry entirely (being human), there are strategies we can employ to reduce its hold on our lives.
One mental habit helpful in managing worry is to consistently envision our lives as a series of 24-hour episodes, and focus our energies on the particular episode we're starring in at the time. It involves a conscious decision to restrict our anxious care only to that block of time between sunrise and bedtime. Of course, that doesn't preclude planning and considering future problems. But it does mean that we learn to live most of our lives in the present tense, where we can actually do something about the problems that face us.
Dale Carnegie, in his classic book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, writes of the eternity behind us and the one before us -- the past and the future -- and our inability to live in either. Today is where we are, and the present is what we should busy ourselves with. Life is a journey of 24 hours today. Then 24 tomorrow, and so on.
You've probably heard this illustration, but it bears repeating: Imagine that a housewife or househusband could see the mountain of dishes that would ultimately need washing throughout all of life. Think of how that person would sink into despair after seeing all the dirty dishes of the future piled up in a one towering stack alongside the Washington Monument.
"Do all this? How will I ever be able to get it done?" The answer, of course, is one sink's worth at a time, one day at a time. Broken down thus, the task is not nearly so daunting. And that is the attitude we must cultivate about life in general. "Each day," said Jesus of Nazareth in his Sermon on the Mount, "has enough trouble of its own."
The objection here is almost immediate: "I just don't look at life that way." Granted, such a perspective doesn't come naturally for a lot of people. For most of us, it's a learned discipline. Similarly, golfers learn to keep the head down when they swing. It doesn't come automatically, it must be acquired through habit -- doing it the right way over and over until it becomes second nature. That's the way we install most of our skills: riding a bicycle, typing, driving a stick shift, etc. Learning to view life from a healthier vantage point is no different.
