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The Man Who Stopped Worrying

Florence Scovel Shinn tells the story of a very successful man who discovered a simple way to change his relationship with fear.

He had achieved great success in his life, but at some point he decided that he no longer wanted fear to have a place in his consciousness.

Then, quite unexpectedly, he came across a sign hanging in a room.

The message on the sign was simple:

"Why worry? It will probably never happen."

Something about those words stayed with him.

The statement became deeply impressed upon his subconscious mind.

From that point on, he developed a firm conviction that only good could come into his life, and therefore only good could manifest.

A simple idea had replaced a deeply established pattern of fear.

"What we repeatedly accept as true within ourselves can become the direction in which our attention moves."

— Edmar Sasaki

Feeling Is The Bridge

At first, this may seem like nothing more than a clever phrase about worrying.

But there is something deeper in the story.

The man did not merely read the words.

He allowed them to become a new inner reference.

Instead of continually imagining what could go wrong, he began to hold a different expectation.

And this is where the story connects with the idea of feeling.

Worry is not simply a thought.

When we worry, we are usually imagining a possible future and experiencing an emotional response to that imagined future as though it were already approaching.

The mind creates a picture.

The feeling follows the picture.

And then attention keeps returning to the same possibility.

The story suggests another possibility: change the picture.

Not by fighting fear all day.

Not by forcing ourselves to feel positive.

But by giving the mind a different direction.

The sentence on the sign gave this man a new direction.

Instead of asking, "What if something goes wrong?" he began from a different assumption.

Perhaps something good could happen.

Perhaps the feared event did not need to happen at all.

And perhaps that is one of the simplest ways to understand what it means to stop worrying.

It does not necessarily mean that we force ourselves to stop thinking.

It may mean that we stop feeding the same mental picture.

Because whatever we repeatedly give our attention to can become familiar.

And what becomes familiar can begin to feel normal.

This is why the story is so relevant to the way we experience our own lives.

We may think we are simply thinking about something.

But our thoughts can also contain images, expectations, and feelings.

And these inner experiences can influence the way we perceive what happens around us.

So perhaps the question is not simply:

"How can I stop worrying?"

Perhaps the better question is:

"What am I repeatedly imagining instead?"

That question brings us back to the beginning.

The imagination is the first action.

The feeling gives life to what the imagination has begun.

And when the inner picture changes, our experience of life can begin to change with it.

We do not need to force an emotion.

We do not need to pretend that everything is perfect.

We can simply become aware of what we are repeatedly imagining and what feeling accompanies it.

Then we can choose a different inner direction.

The imagination is the first action.

The feeling is the bridge.

Feeling Is The Bridge