How to handle anticipatory anxiety and anticipatory grief
And why it actually serves a purpose
Our Candlelight Chat this past Sunday, on the Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” and on being a Highly Sensitive Person (“HSP”), was so so good. Thank you so much to all who attended, for your uniquely thoughtful and kind-hearted energy, which I felt all the way across the Internet.
And, if you missed it, not to worry; we’ll send out the replay video to all subscribers/scholarship members soon!
As per the Wendell Berry poem, in which the poet “comes into” the peace of wild animals “who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief,” we talked a little about anticipatory anxiety and anticipatory grief. Surely these are some of the more useless and unpleasant of emotional states. How can we manage not to succumb to them?
I shared a few tips on Sunday, and promised to share more here. So that’s what we’re talking about today.
But the first and most important thing to realize is that these states of being, annoying though they are, do serve a purpose. Sometimes, we worry because there really is something we can fix - and only the unpleasantness of worrying gets us to do the work of fixing it.