Worry is a fire that burns the living, not tomorrow

Here someone will rightly object: but surely thinking about the future is wise? Should we just drift, plan nothing? No — and this is the distinction that quietly changes everything. Worry and planning feel similar from inside, but they are opposites in what they do.

Planning looks at tomorrow, decides what can be done today, does it, and then sets the matter down. It has a beginning and an end. It moves toward an action and is finished. Worry looks at the very same tomorrow and does not move at all. It circles. It picks the fear up, puts it down, picks it up again, an hour later, the same loop with no exit and no action at the end of it.

So there is a simple test you can hold any anxious thought up against. Ask it one question: does this end in something I can do, or does it just go round again? If it points to an action — make the call, save the money, see the doctor, prepare the file — then it is planning; do the thing and let it go. If it points nowhere, if it only wants to be felt again and again, then it is worry, and worry has no use for you. It is not protecting your future. It is just eating your present, one circle at a time.

Worry survives because it tells us a few quiet lies, and we believe them without ever checking. It is worth dragging them into the light.

The first lie: 'worrying means I care.' But a parent who worries all night and a parent who calmly does what is needed both love their child — the worry added nothing except a worse morning. Caring is shown by what you do, not by how much you suffer in advance.

The second lie: 'if I stop worrying, something bad will happen — the worry is keeping me safe.' Look back honestly at your own life. Did the hours of dread ever once reach into the future and change it? Or did the things that actually went wrong tend to be the ones you never saw coming, while most of what you rehearsed in fear never arrived at all?

That is the fact under the myth. Mark Twain is supposed to have said he had known a great many troubles, most of which never happened. Worry has a near-perfect record of being wrong, and even when the hard thing does come, the worrying did not soften it — it only made you suffer it twice, once in imagination and once for real. It charges full price for a thing it cannot deliver.

Our older voices saw this clearly, and they did not speak of it gently — they used the language of fire. There is a much-loved Sanskrit line that plays on two almost identical words: 'chita chinta samaprokta, bindu-matram visheshata; sajivam dahate chinta, nirjivam dahate chita.' The pyre (chita) and worry (chinta) are nearly the same word, separated by a single dot — and they do nearly the same work. The difference: the pyre burns the dead, while worry burns the living.

Kabir put it just as bluntly: 'chinta aisi dakini, kaati kareja khaay' — worry is a witch that saws through the heart and eats it; what can the poor physician do, how long can his medicine reach? He is saying plainly that this is not a small mood. It is a slow consuming.

Even the Gita, describing the most trapped kind of mind, names it as one bound by 'chintam aparimeyam cha pralayantam upashritah' (16.11) — caught in measureless anxiety that ends only at death. That is the warning. A mind given fully to worry does not arrive anywhere; it just burns until the end. And the way out the tradition keeps pointing to is not cleverer worrying but a turning of weight: do your honest part today, with full care, and loosen your grip on a result that was never wholly in your hands.

Why give all this so much attention? Because of a piece of arithmetic that is easy to miss. You only ever get to live one day at a time — this one. Tomorrow, when it comes, will also arrive as a today. So every today you hand over to worry about some tomorrow is not a rehearsal for life; it is life itself, spent. Worry does not borrow against the future. It spends the present, and the present is all there ever is.

That does not mean becoming careless, or pretending the future holds no real difficulties. It means something more honest and more useful: meeting tomorrow's problems with tomorrow's strength, on the day they are actually here, instead of dragging them into a night where you can do nothing but ache.

So here is the small, doable first step, the next time 'what will happen tomorrow' starts its loop. Pause and ask it one plain question: is there anything I can do about this right now? If there is, get up and do that one thing — that is planning, and it is good. If there is nothing to do, then the thought is only worry wanting to be fed. Let it pass, the way you let a cloud pass, and come back to the single day that is actually in your hands. Tomorrow is not yet asking anything of you. Why answer a question that has not yet been asked?