October 14, 2025- Today's choices

Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe.

~Megan Devine

What if this happens? How would we ever recover from that? It just seems like I can never catch a break, so I can only imagine the worst.

At what point does the damage we do to ourselves by worrying about worst-case scenarios exceed the damage we would do by wandering around, completely naïve and unprepared for any negative outcomes?

So much of what we spend our time and energy worrying about never actually happens. When it does, it is often far less catastrophic than what we feared it would be. Most importantly, even if things are just as bad as we feared, they still happened, despite our mental rehearsals. Then, not only do we have to suffer through the event, but we have to endure all the extra anticipatory suffering that preceded it.

We are happiest when our thoughts are where our feet are. We have our next choice, and the entirety of our power lies within it. Letting our thoughts bounce frantically between the past and the future will not give us any more power, but it will limit our capacity to make choices that serve us right here and right now.

We are today’s choices.