Worth the Worry
January 6, 2020

     In one sense, I am a professional worrier.  As an attorney, I get paid to think about details.  I not only read the fine print, I research how the fine print has been interpreted in specific situations.  And when I am drafting or negotiating a new contract, I am the one creating the fine print.  In my estate planning work, I help my clients think through details and contingencies surrounding their death or incapacitation that they didn‛t even know to think about.  And when I‛m working on a contested matter or one in outright litigation, I think in great detail about the strengths and weaknesses of my opponent‛s position, in order to identify potential paths to resolution.  Sometimes there are multiple parties involved, and in those cases, it‛s like playing multiple chess games at once – lots of variables, many moving parts.  

     In short, it‛s my job to sweat the small stuff.

     But in general, I do not consider myself an anxious person.  I was fortunate as a student never to really suffer from test anxiety – perhaps in part as a function of my basic personality, perhaps also because I usually studied enough to mitigate the negative effects of anxiety.  In other words, I worried just enough to deal with the underlying source of the worry, without letting it overwhelm me.  Even today, with all my committments, responsibilities, and projects, I don‛t find myself racked with worry most of the time.  I find action to be a fairly hearty antidote to anxiety, particularly action based on sound values identified through wise counsel.  And somehow, I usually manage to find wise counsel.

     But this is not to say that my life is worry-free.  There are many things I worry about, some worth the mental, emotional, and physical cost of worrying, some not.  And just because I don‛t typically find myself paralyzed with worry over these things does not mean they are not worth examining.

     Last year, I had a series of dreams – maybe three or four of them – that all ended with me falling into a body of water, usually in circumstances where it would be difficult for me to escape.  In at least two of them, I was in a moving vehicle with other people, and the vehicle went off a bridge into the water below.  Each time, I woke up shortly after coming in contact with the water.  And in each case, I remember thinking upon waking that my subconscious must be really worried about something.  I assumed that my subconscious was just feeling the collective toll of some of my particularly thorny cases, coupled with concern over several of my community projects.  And as I  made progress or reached breakthroughs in some of those matters, these dreams subsided.

     But I had a similar one two nights ago.  No engulfing bodies of water this time, but instead a frantic attempt to get into an airport, thwarted by the fact that my belongings were unorganized, strewn all over the car I was in.  That was stressful enough, but then the driver of my vehicle started the car and left the airport.  Next thing I knew, we were on a bridge (there‛s a bridge again) that was partially under repair and only allowed one lane of traffic at a time.  To my horror, my driver aimed the car right into the oncoming line of traffic.  Fortunately, the opposing car line was nearly at a standstill, so there was no dramatic crash.  But the first few cars in the oncoming line had to peel over to let my car pass through.  Not surprisingly, we didn‛t make it very far before reaching an impasse.  Somehow, in the mildly miraculous manner of dreams, my driver turned the vehicle around and started crawling with the traffic, only to find our line met with the opposing line of traffic just a few vehicles ahead of us, at a point about two-thirds of the way across the bridge.  The lead car in my line (not my vehicle this time) again pressed into the oncoming traffic, with the nearly stationary oncoming cars peeling over as far as possible to accomodate.  The situation was frustrating certainly, but then took a darker turn.  The last thing I saw was a man in a van or bus a few vehicles ahead of me about to get crushed into the concrete side rail of the bridge as another vehicle tried to peel over for the lead car in my line.  I woke up just before that happened – but not soon enough to avoid feeling a sense of guilt about the situation, like somehow I was partially responsible for what was about to happen.

     Now, I have no special knowledge or beliefs about dream interpretation, and I am generally skeptical about claims from pop culture sources about ‟decoding‟ dreams.  But at a minimum, I find the images and emotions of this dream sufficiently startling, particularly the sense of guilt/responsibility at the end, to justify some exploration.  I‛m no psychologist, so I hesitate to try to unpack the details of this particular dream with any great deal of granularity – although that may be called for at some point.  For now, what the dream has suggested to me is a more general reflection on feelings of worry, anxiety, guilt, and responsibility.  It gives rise to this question for me:  What is worth worrying about?  This may take some time to sort out.