To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.
Interpretation
Worrying is a complex human experience driven by our ability to think and feel deeply about future uncertainties.
This quote by Edward Hallowell highlights the human tendency to worry, which is enabled by our advanced cognitive abilities. Unlike any other species, humans can combine reasoning, memory, reflection, emotion, and imagination to construct fears about the future, thereby amplifying our anxieties and concerns through our thoughts and feelings.
In practice
In a mental health seminar discussing the effects of worry on daily life.
I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we're carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what's happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better.
Big-picture thinkers broaden their outlook by striving to learn from every experience. They don't rest on their successes, they learn from them.
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary error is often more earnest than truth.
When you have emptied all content - thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes - when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space, that virgin space within you. Unburdened by anything, that contentless consciousness, that's what you are! Seeing it, realizing it, one is free. One is freedom, one is joy, one is bliss.
Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.
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