My children can always find something to worry about, yet worry doesn’t have to be a way of life. Forego worry. You don’t have to have it, one worry on top of another. This is not the way to live life.

Life in the world itself has tension in that there is an unevenness that you surmount, sort of the pull of goodness and mercy on one side, and friction on the other.

When you knit a sweater, both needles have a balance of tension. Tension is not meant to be lop-sided. The form of tension that you call worry is uneven tension. Sometimes worry even feels like panic. Fraught with worry, your tension is really askew.

Will you kindly remember that life offers much more than one of two choices? Please remember that tension is a decision you make, a path you choose, a rocky road with pitfalls that you practice on. You rehearse unimagined pitfalls. That’s just it. You do imagine fretful possibilities, and you have good imagination. Beforehand is always imagination.

Worry is not a comfortable state to be in. It is worry itself that is fraught with danger. When you go to a state fair, you have a choice of riding the merry-go-round or the roller coaster or cyclone and other rides in between, or you can also just walk around. Why choose a ride you don’t want?

In terms of worry, you don’t want to meet life halfway. It is not life you are meeting halfway but worry itself. You may run up to meet worry as though worry is a good-luck charm. You may greet worry, welcome it as if focus on worry were a form of avoidance, as if you worry in order to forestall something to really worry about. You may feel that if you worry hard enough, you will get a reprieve. Meanwhile, you give yourself a rough ride. You put yourself through worry when you could put yourself through joy.

If you must imagine, imagine joy then. Joy costs you less. Worry doesn’t have to catch up with you. You don’t have to be merciless with yourself and pile up worry as if worries were pillows to lean on.

I will say unequivocally that you have overdosed on worry. Give yourself a get-out-of-jail card free. You don’t have to earn worry. You don’t have to have it at all. You can dismiss it. You have had enough of worry which, after all, seems to be a bad habit. You latch on to worry, and now it is hard to let go of.

Put worry aside. You don’t have to catch up to it. Put worry in parentheses and move right along. If worry is a crutch, it is a crutch that is cracked. Worry is too much to carry. Do not give worry such a foothold in your heart.

Worry is like mold in a basement. Once it gets going, it’s hard to get out. Quarantine the mold of worry. Get worry out of your mind. Clean out the worry. Worry is like a ghost or even a flibberty-gibbet. Worry is for sure not a cure-all. It is not a piece of cake to worry as often and as much as you do.

Cast off worry. Find another hobby to occupy your mind.

You do not deserve an assortment of worry. You don’t have to have it. If there is a mess around in your house, get up and straighten it out. It is not for you to sit and rue the mess. It is for you to take care of it.

If worry is an intruder, and I say it is, you don’t have to cry, “Uncle,” and surrender to it. You don’t have to be a friend to worry. You are not obligated to it. Be carefree instead.

Look, if life is going to blind-side you, it will whether you worry or not. Worry is not prevention. It is more like a clarion-call or a routine rehearsal so you won’t be surprised when something you don’t want comes to pass. Worry is a run-through, a kind of pre-burden, pre-worry, kind of a dry-run. No longer save up your worry as though it were a knack worth developing. Unwind worry, and then you won’t worry so much. Toss out worry. Pull up the shades and let the sun in. The sun waits for you. Catch the sun!