ANXIETY? SMOTHER IT SOME WITH SOME OTHERNESS

(These thoughts are added to three times each week)

It is natural and to a degree necessary to be concerned with our own well being.. Complete 100 % altruism is both impossible and destructive Nevertheless for mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well being we all need to care about someone besides ourselves. And go the extra mile in the process.

Let me give you some examples to better illustrate what I mean.

A child gives his favorite toy to a neighbor child who has grown quite sick. “I just felt it would mean more if I gave something I really wanted to keep.”

A woman volunteers to baby sit so a neighbor and her husband, who can’t afford to otherwise, can go out for the evening. “I don’t even like children,” she thought to herself as she volunteered “but that is the point.”

Nor does it hurt to be CREATIVE!. Take some stuffed animals to a children’s hospital. Be kind toward the environment around you; pick up some trash on the sidewalk instead of just complaining about the person who threw it there. Clean out your clothes closet and take those clothes you haven’t worn for months or years to a local non-profit organization. Have you just finished an inspiring book you probably won’t read again? The next time a sales person is mean or inattentive leave it on their counter with a note, “I enjoyed this book. I hope you will do the same and pass it on.” (That’s why you’ve been carrying that book around…just waiting for the right person to leave it with)

Share your umbrella with a stranger. Write a note that tells someone all the good things you see in them. It is infinitely better than waiting until you stand around their grave saying them.

Wrap ourselves in a cloak of “me, my and mine” and soon every anxious fiber of our being is running round and round in our head, wearing holes in our sense of stability. Wearing us out but not the anxiety.

The good thing about all of this is that it is a program one can start immediately. It requires no start up fund. A little advance planning but then that is fun. It certainly adds significance to a life and that is good any day in the week.

Bob Hope put it well when he said, “If you have no charity in your heart you have the worst kind of heart trouble.” “Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting” wrote Elizabeth Bibeaco. These are two of my favorite antidotes for anxiety.