My doctor once told me that half of the people who come to see him do not really have a problem. It is just that they worry too much about aches and pains that, given time, will heal by them selves. They are the worry bugs who always fear something is going to bite them anytime soon.

     There is a saying that says “Thinking too much about the future makes the present unpleasant.” That is so true. There are those among us who worry themselves sick. Yes, they feel sick because they believe they are sick when they clearly are not.

     The mind can play tricks on you. It can actually convince you that there must be something wrong with you when there isn’t.

     Countless ideas never leave the mind because people worry that they will fail, and they fear failing so much that they fail by default by doing nothing. Like the basketball team that is so fearful of losing by a great margin that they decide to forfeit the game and lose by the score of 2 to 0. That is better they think, than getting beat by 40 points.

     Too many of us worry about the future to the point of giving up an idea before even the idea is born. We get frightened into paralysis and become unable to even give the idea a chance to be born into reality. It is as if fear rules us and intimidates us into immobility.

     I remember a friend, in his early twenties who was convinced that he would never live to be forty. He worried that nuclear war would wipe out all humans. He feared that some disease would take him down in his youth. But he lived well into his seventies. All those years of worry counted for nothing. It is a pity that he did not put all. That negative energy thinking about his demise into something more positive.

     Life itself is a risk. My daughter who is a scuba diver told me recently that she had conquered her fear of sharks when she saw a number of them and was not attacked. I just read in Time Magazine that she need not have worried all these years. Time says that the odds of being killed by a shark are one in two-hundred eight million. With those odds, sharks are the last thing she should worry about. She had more than 80 dives before she ever saw just one shark.

     So let’s take life one day at the time, like a popular spiritual song says. sure, we need to think and plan for the future, but not to the point where we make today more difficult than it deserves.