From Worrier to Warrior

Embracing Uncertainty in Chaotic Times

What does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? Your journey through life becomes heroic the moment you become willing to engage in struggles worthy of yourself. It can take more faith and patience than you know in the moment you have in you, but something in you perseveres through the dark night trusting that the path forward can be found.

--Carol Orsborn, Flashlight for a Dark Night, Substack

As I write, our dream home—the one my husband of 55 years and I had always expected to retire in-- is one signature away from being sold. We are not just leaving behind the dwelling and the memories and aspirations it represents, but an entire country, to live closer to our daughter in Canada for this next stretch of our lives.

We are also leaving behind the illusion of our certainty about the future—that we have even a fraction of the control we thought we had over our lives and times. However hard we try, we can’t keep up with the disruptive changes that are taking place all around us, in our country and the world, let alone our physical bodies and challenged beliefs. We feel good about our decision to move. On good days, I can think as long as 5 years at a time and imagine the best possible outcomes. On others, feeling a random creak in my bones or inadvertently assaulted by a horrifying headline, I can’t hold any sense of life mastery for even one minute.

The bottom line is this. I (and I bet you, too) have been very worried about the future. How could we not be when dearly-held expectations and values are annihilated hourly. That said, given the amount of precious time I’ve invested in worrying, you‘d think I’d have something more to show for it by now than a present that continues to confound and a future that seems increasingly out of control.

I know better. For all my long spiritual life, I have aspired to be grounded in the face of things before which I am powerless. I aim to embrace uncertainty with the graciousness of The Serenity Prayer, with the sense of myself, my purpose and the meaning of life anchored in the unshakeable truth of God’s love. Along these lines, I persist in believing that it is impingent upon me to take into account accepting reality for what it can’t help being, and that ours is essentially a friendly universe—the foundational principles of spiritual aging.

Apparently, where I had gone wrong was in believing that this faith would ground me. Which is a fancy way of saying that I erroneously believed that the antidote to worrying is either a) stop what I fear most from happening by making a plan that I could guarantee would work or falling short of this b) somehow be okay with this. Grounded sounds like a worthwhile aspiration but challenging in those times when the earth is already shaking and threatening to swallow me whole.

Now hear me, there’s nothing wrong with planning. Planning is probably what you are already really good at and has worked for you on multiple occasions. It got us across the border, for instance and into a sweet condo—so there’s two things at least—I can take off the list of things to worry about. But two things is not everything and chances are whatever it is you are worrying about now—the even bigger stuff that resists taming--has already been submitted to your best efforts. But life has this funny way of turning even our most well-intentioned planning into rumination and the longer it resists resolution, into dread.

There’s a subtle difference between planning and worrying. Planning is a logical progression of objectively weighing and balancing the options. Strategies considered and ultimately adopted are actionable and the more favorable outcomes potentially achievable. On the other hand, you know you are no longer engaged in planning but rather nonproductive worrying when rather than objectively explore options and outcomes, your fraught mind starts and ends with and can’t get past envisioning the worst possible outcome. Looping back around virtually unchanged by its repetitive turns through your fevered brain, your worst fear takes shape as a compelling story complete with sound effects, scents and feelings. Mesmerized by our creation, we trade the good enough present moment to instead take up residence in the worst possible future we can envision. Whether or not this is rooted in fact—or even probability—we find ourselves trapped in the fearsome experience of something here and now that might not otherwise take place, After all, while it’s true we can ‘t always stop the bad things from happening, neither can we stop the good—often when we least expect it. Recognizing when we have trapped ourselves is the initiation of the hero’s journey.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron shows the way out. She begins by blowing the whistle on the very aspiration to be grounded in the face of uncertainty. Instead, she advocates the stance of “groundlessness.” Groundlessness is ironically the more reliable spiritual goal as it assumes your illusory grasp on the future comes pre-shattered. To her practiced eye, we free ourselves from worry when we admit it’s only a story and that we don’t know what the future holds for us. If there is a plan to be made, we will not bring our most clear-headed thinking to whatever it is we’re facing when our brains are on fire. Humility clears our minds and allows us to set us free from our scary stories about the future even if it forces us to confront our aspirations for certainty. Per Chodron, we can’t aim to stand on solid ground because there is no such thing as solid ground.

Writes Chodron: “As we practice moving into the present moment this way we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky – – that’s called liberation.”

In place of rerunning worst case scenarios, our spacious eyes are free to scan the inner horizon for the glimmer of hope that is always to be found in the ashes of illusion. We enjoy the spaciousness that occupies the space formerly inhabited by embodying worst case scenarios. A crack of light gets in. Love, too. Inspiration. Clarity. And, of course, gratitude. Everything else is details.

Just over the border to Canada, en route to this new life, we met up with old friends. Like us, they recently made a bold move from their community of many years following their hearts into the unknown of a new house and city. Strangers in a new land, they were not immune to double-guessing their choices, worrying about where the path they’d chosen might lead. But in the present moment their eyes shone brightly as they told us of a nearby park they had discovered.

As they tell it, seated in the parking lot, and not yet knowing their way around, they could not identify a single sign to point the way. Then one of them spotted a tree with a white stripe on its trunk. Wondering if it might indicate a trail, they dove in. They walked longer than they would have liked through the dark woods only to see the trail disappear around a bend. Would they need to turn the long way back or risk getting lost? They chose adventure and as it turned out, just around the bend suddenly appeared another even bigger tree marked with a white stripe. Every time they worried about losing their way, they could just make out around a bend, over a ridge or in one distinct fork a tree with a white stripe. They ended the hike back in the parking lot safe and sound, delighted in their journey.

They had come to understand that with this trail, as in life, you can’t see the next stripe from where you are and so do you have to just walk in faith that by the time you have to make a decision about which way to go, the next stripe will come into view. The walk, itself, changes you and when you arrive to the future you had once feared, you will not be the same person who set out. It helps, of course, to believe that the universe is ultimately on your side regardless of the circumstances you face. Everything else is details.

I still worry about the future from time to time—who wouldn’t given the state of the world and our big move? But I am no longer consumed by it. So the question has become how am I to walk this patch of road of uncertainty…the one that is sometimes sad, sometimes scary but also all the while leading me through interesting challenges, unconditional, love, spiritual growth?

I am no longer obsessed with worries because I do not want to squander this or any moment worrying about how to regain control over the future, but rather use my precious time and energy to fortify my belief that whatever the future holds, I will be fully present and accounted for. Only in this way do we transform ourselves from chronic worriers to spiritual warriors—bravely advancing towards whatever lies ahead one white stripe at a time.