A Final Thought: “Don’t worry, Baby. It’ll be all right.”

My wife and I have many chipmunks in our Fairlawn back yard. They do only minor damage, so I don’t mind. These creatures hit the jackpot when they settled here—the safflower seed overflowing from our bird feeder gives them plenty to eat.

Still, I have noticed they are constantly filled with anxiety, forever darting their little heads nervously back and forth, alert for the many predators that will eat them. They scurry along quickly, fretfully to avoid being pounced upon. They never relax. Never.

Then I realized that people often live this way, too, in a state of constant anxiety, worrying about all the ways in which we or our loved ones may be harmed, agonizing over all we have to lose—our health, our money, our homes, our reputations, our freedoms, our loved ones, even our lives.

Last week, I pointed out a nervous little chipmunk to my wife and expressed this very concept. She looked at me and said, “Welcome to my world.”

I’ve never been much of a worrier. I leave that to her. She says she’s going to put on my tombstone the advice I often give her: “Don’t worry, Baby. It’ll be all right.”

(Trust me, telling a worrier not to worry is the opposite of helpful.)

When it comes to happiness, I look to the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of literature. When Gilgamesh was deeply mourning his brother’s death, he didn’t want to suffer the same fate, so he set out in search of immortality. On his journey, he met the alewife Siduri, a goddess and brewmaster, who shared with him this advice:

Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering?

Life, which you look for, you will never find.

For when the gods created man, they let

death be his share, and life

withheld in their own hands.

Gilgamesh, fill your belly—

day and night make merry,

let days be full of joy,

dance and make music day and night.

And wear fresh clothes,

and wash your head and bathe.

Look at the child that is holding your hand,

and let your wife delight in your embrace.

These things alone are the concern of men.

Here, Siduri offers us several pieces of advice, including two that especially resonate with me: enjoy life’s simple pleasures and cherish relationships.

It’s difficult to enjoy life’s simple pleasures when there is so much work to do. My wife once had a boss named Roger Slater who related this story from his childhood: He and his father were working in the fields on their small Mississippi farm when a group of young boys came by with baseball gloves and a ball and bat. “Can Roger come play baseball with us?” they asked. Roger looked up hopefully at his dad seated on the tractor. His father replied, “No, boy. We gotta work.”

That became an unfortunate mantra for my wife and me. Whenever one of us suggests shirking our responsibilities to do something fun, the other says, “No, boy. We gotta work.” Thankfully, we are better at this now that we’re older.

Sometimes it’s okay to play ball.

Cherishing relationships can be difficult, too, because we often feel compelled to “fix” the ones we love rather than accepting them for who they are. Allowing people to be themselves without correcting them is essential to this idea of “cherishing.” We cherish a piece of artwork precisely because we do not want to change it.

I experienced this firsthand while fishing in a Louisiana bayou with my cousin David Thibodaux. I held up a shiny lure from my tackle box and asked, “Would this be a good lure to use?” David replied in his classic Cajun accent, “Ooo, man, yeah. Dat lure right der gon’ catch a lotta dese fish.”

Of course, I knew it wasn’t true. Hospitality was the bedrock of David’s personality. He understood that reinforcing my choice of lure—and my ego as a fisherman—would make me feel better than any fish I could possibly catch. He did not correct me.

A couple of years later, David died at age 56 from an undiagnosed heart condition, four months after I lost my own brother at age 50. I didn’t always know how to, but in the end I cherished them both.

I’ll leave you with this quote often attributed to John Lennon:

Everything will be okay in the end.

If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Mitch@MimiVanderhaven.com