A drawer marked “Tomorrow Afternoon”

When my husband delivered the eulogy for my mother, he termed her “a word-class worrier,” and it was true. My mother had a tremendous capacity for worrying. She did it better than almost anyone I knew. My father was five minutes late coming home from work? “He could have been in a car accident,” “his store could have been robbed,” “he could be lying dead in a pool of blood.” And she worried. My mother would stand by the window, willing him to arrive. We couldn’t use the phone because he or the police might be trying to reach us. Then, she would pick up the phone and call the store. The phone would ring a couple of times and he would pick it up and tell her that he was with a customer who had come in just before closing. She would ask him to call before he left (I assume so she would know at what point to begin worrying again) and if too much time went by, she would call to check if he had left yet.

This was a pattern of our lives. Our days were filled with drama because who knew what tragedy could befall any of us at any moment.

It served some positive purposes: my sister and I are perhaps the most cautious people I know. We simply did not take chances. We knew that any misstep could invite disaster.

But my mother’s worrying was not an aberration. It was an exaggeration. All of us worry to some extent. And in many cases, worry is good—if it causes us to be prepared or to be cautious of real danger.

For example, recently there was a tragic accident on a school trip in the northern part of Israel where three children, who had been instructed not to enter the cold water of a stream, either willingly jumped in or fell in. One child died as a result of entering the very cold water and having limited swimming ability despite the immediate response of the people accompanying him. In this case, the investigation showed that the adults had acted responsibly and the outcome was still tragic. School trips to the area continue, but I imagine that the worry that the chaperones now harbor inspires extra caution and extra warning to the children.

But worry can be destructive as well. Today it is a beautiful sunlit day. The temperature is about 75 F/23 C. Our garden is sweet smelling with the scents of lemongrass, rosemary, lavender, and sage. Our trees are growing clementines and lemons, and our decorative plum tree has yielded the world’s sweetest plums.

But what am I thinking about? My daughter’s new (less than one-year old) refrigerator has stopped cooling and the repairman can’t come until tomorrow afternoon. My worry, that has no purpose, has distracted me from the wonder of life, the beauty that abounds, the joy of friendship and the love of family.

Sometimes I tell my clients to metaphorically take the worry, define it, compress it, wrap it up in a package (preferably brown paper) and put it away. I am filing mine in a drawer marked “tomorrow afternoon.”