Untroubled Waters

Worry Is Not Your Inheritance a Black History Month Meditation for all

Breaking Up with the Worry Habit

I come from a worrying people, a worrying environment.

Still my life is anchored.

The spirituality of anchoring dives into the ocean where dreams and deep Black bodies flow and finally live. There is something wiser than my worry holding me. Something wider than my exhaustion. Something holier than my habit.

Black History Month invites me to remember:

• My ancestors had every reason to worry.

• And yet they sang.

• They built.

• They loved.

• They imagined freedom in fields that denied it.

• Their survival was not only vigilance it was vision.

What if breaking up with worry is also an act of ancestral honor?

What if rest is reparative? What if exhaling is redemptive? What if trust is a form of relief?

It floors me when someone says they don’t really worry. I don’t know that life. Worry has been a dishonest friend trailing me for nearly fifty years. Persistent. Loyal. Loud.

To imagine a world where worry is not my side-companion feels more frightening than the stress of worry itself. If I stop worrying, will everything fall apart?

If I don’t brace myself for disaster, will disaster arrive offended by my ease?

Worry became a necessary chaos. An embodied current in my thought life. I could not catch it at the moment it emerged. By the time I noticed it, it had already set up a charge.

-And there is so much to worry about.

Personal security, financial strain, career fumbles, the thin line between stability and loss. Politically always something. Historically everything.

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I watched some family pass worry down like an heirloom. It was love’s anxious twin. It was vigilance. It was preparation. It was survival dressed up as concern.

However, it was covered in love and now that example is transformed for them and us all, with a new identity of trust.

What would happen if I exhaled?

Not the therapized version of exhale. Not the performative wellness exhale.

A real exhale.

Breathing alone does not feel like enough for my Black body my Black pain, the racial trauma, the excessive striving, the bone-tired disappointment of being a writer navigating a money crisis and job loss in a world that praises art but rarely funds the artist.

Worry solves nothing, yes, I know this. I have heard the sermons. I have read the scriptures. I have whispered the affirmations.

But worry is a hauntingly deceptive habit. And habits once served a purpose. Somewhere along the way, worry must have soothed me. It must have convinced me that if I rehearsed the worst, I could soften its blow.

Perhaps it kept a deeper meaning from surfacing the lie of helplessness, the sense of not being able to save myself or those I love.

In my faith, there is the question: If you worry, why pray? If you pray, why worry?

But God’s grace, I believe, exceeds my ability to perform perfect faith. I pray. I believe. I release. And sometimes I pick the worry back up again like a familiar warmth covering the fear of the unknown.

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Still my life remains deeply anchored.

If I could solve all my problems, perhaps the worry would dissolve. But as of now, all I can do is acknowledge I am a worrier wishing to loosen this time-consuming habit.

I want untroubled waters not because the world is calm, but because my spirit can be.

I have more stillness to explore. More reimagining. More world-creating and co-creating. I want to stand in the crescent moon of love without rehearsing catastrophe. I want to build a practice of release that is as disciplined as my anxious feelings once was.

Maybe this Black History Month, I don’t need to conquer worry. Maybe it’s to just BE.

Maybe I just need to practice exhaling long enough to remember I am held. I am becoming. I am not required to carry the whole storm.

Hard times come and hardships go; my worth is not entangled in the hard.

My hope is tethered to my faith, an ocean that reminds me storms are not the end of the story. They are often the birthplace of new beauty.

We are not alone in unlearning inherited worry. We are gathered in the room of need abiding in the presence of ‘one day at a time’.

Together, we are walking toward a more peaceful journey.

• Some of us including myself, inherited worry before we inherited language-for this we give grace.

• For many of us, worry feels safer than hope-for this we give grace.

• We learned to brace for the bad before we learned to breathe-for this we give grace.

• In a world that keeps shaking, who wouldn’t worry? -for this we give grace

  This Black History Month shout with me: Hope is also an inheritance, the strength of water like a river flows through me; us all.

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Question/Comment

What would happen if you exhaled for real?

What if trust is the bravest thing you could practice right now?