The Fog of Worry

When I was a kid, my parents used to, on long drives, play cassettes. We didn't listen to a lot of live radio, but we'd have boxes of cassettes, and one of those boxes was somebody that you may know called Earl Nightingale. And if you know the name, you remember his voice — he had this deep, rolling baritone voice, and a great delivery, and a lot of wisdom. And something I remember to this day from those trips on the freeways of California, listening to his cassettes, was something called "the fog of worry." It really struck me and stayed with me.

Let's think about fog, and let's think about worry, and how worry sometimes overwhelms us in the same way that fog does, and blocks our ability to move forward, to see clearly. Well, think about this: a government office called the Bureau of Standards made a density experiment. They wanted to see how much actual moisture was in a dense fog over a span of seven city blocks and a hundred feet in height. Seven city blocks, a hundred feet in height — only amounted to, if there's a drum roll you hear it, one glass of water. Now, I find that hard to believe, but I'm going to trust what I read — the Bureau of Standards statistics — one glass of water. Well, think about that, and think about your own worries, and how they may also be disproportionate to what you think they are, and maybe more powerful in your life than they should be.

According to Earl Nightingale, forty percent of the things you and I worry about will never happen — so why worry? Thirty percent of the things you and I worry about, middle of the night or middle of the day, happened in the past, can't be changed — so why worry? That's already seventy percent of the things that we typically worry about. Twelve percent of the things that may have kept you awake in the night, or have you distracted in the day, are needless worries about your health. Statistically, ten percent are petty, miscellaneous worries. Only eight percent are legitimate worries. Only eight percent.

Of the things that you and I are spending so much energy and life force worrying about, that are distracting us from the people that need us, from the conversations that deserve us, from the experiences that are here to teach us and to inspire us, to move us, to make us joyful — how much do we allow worry to overpower them, to cloud our vision of them, to take us a distance from them, to make us less than present? If eight percent of the things we worry about are legitimate and worthy of our worry, how much more sleep do you and I think we might be able to get tonight? I hope this provokes your thought, and provokes a better sense of balance between what's actual and what's only perceived.