In concentrating simply and solely upon what is happening at this moment, anticipation and anxiety vanish.
-Alan Watts
Right before I started writing this daily thought I consumed an entire bag of sweet and salty trail mix. Notice that I wasn’t writing the daily thought while I was eating the trail mix. I didn’t mean to eat the entire bag but I was in a state of heavenly bliss and lost all self-control. However, in the moment of trail mix consumption, all anticipation and anxiety vanished. This mindfulness stuff really works when you practice it enough. You cannot think two separately thoughts at the same time. If you are having multiple thoughts, you are bouncing around from one thought to another. If you think I am wrong, I challenge you to think two separate and distinct thoughts at the same time. It is the same when you are concentrating on one activity at a time. When you are concentrating simply and solely upon what is happening in the moment, nothing else exists. When I was concentrating on the consumption of my trail mix, I was relieved of all work anxiety, at least until the trail mix was gone. Multi-thinking, or having too much going on in your mind at the same time, and multi-tasking, doing too many things at the same time, is the source of much stress in our lives. When you eliminate anxiety, you eliminate stress. In the Catholic mass, one of the prayers said by the priest is “Free us, Lord, from all anxiety”. Even on a spiritual level, anxiety is seen as something that oppresses our lives. We will still have occasional moments of stress that are beyond our control but most of our reactions to life are within our control. May we all be free of anxiety and worry.
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