When the World is Too Much With Us: Do Just One Thing

By Alex Ratcliffe

Do you know the old joke/story: “Why worry? There are only two things to worry about…”

Well, no, there aren’t. There are an infinite number of things to worry about. And they will never end.

You can group worries into stages of life.

When does a baby, I wonder, start to worry? When it feels hunger? Take it from there…These days three-year-olds have to worry, or have worry surrounding them, about getting a place in a good nursery, for example. That’s really the mother’s worry, but when it happens, then the child’s worry may be, hmmm, will I ever see my mother again? Seriously, the hope is that children remain carefree for quite some time and perhaps worry doesn’t really kick in until things start to go wrong or their first test in primary school or whenever they are first told, “On this, your whole life depends…”.

If small children escape worries until their teenage years, then they can count on a whole new set of physical, emotional and existential worries to contemplate. And once they have most definitely sorted out their life’s trajectory with a place in college or university, they can then begin a whole new set of worries. We can even refer to the 20’s and 30’s as The Really Big Time for Worry: What will I do with my life? Is my career choice the right one? Who should I live with? Will I marry? And, why can’t I find true love?

Just in case you thought that settling down with The One would resolve some of these worries, now you have a mortgage and a whole family whose worries you too can worry about, basically, forever. Awaiting worry-free retirement? That care-free trip around the world? How many worry-free 60 and 70 year olds do you know? Hopefully it can wind down a bit until you perhaps have made it to a healthy 80. Then you might find it’s time to stop worrying. By that time, there are indeed only two things to worry about…..

And then there is the World which, as Wordsworth wrote in in the 19th century, is frankly, just Too Much With Us. Especially of late, when we turn on the news. Here you are, having a nice cup of tea, and find yourself weeping for the plight of humanity, feeling the urgency to ‘do’ something, about this, about that, about everything, and right now. The heart breaks. ‘This must stop…’ Meanwhile, have you updated your status, posted those holiday pics, answered the emails and put out the bin, and how can you be bothered by such trivia when you’ve just seen the Sudanese man who walked 31 miles through the Channel Tunnel to seek asylum? Given his suffering, all the suffering, is it right for you and I to feel any anxiety about anything at all? Thus we have anxiety about anxiety…

When everything seems to be unravelling at breakneck speed, we have this saying in Britain: Keep Calm and Carry On, or, Have a Cup of Tea. But yesterday I practised something different. You can shut everything out, or, you can let everything in, but in a different way: You can “make love with the present moment”. But what does that mean? A silent state of aligned Presence with this Moment and all that that entails. There are many ways to achieve this, but one simple way is this: Do Just One Thing, even whilst the world of responsibility, trouble and worry swirls about your head.

In this case, I was, of all things, polishing silver spoons. Why? Because they were there. I found them in the back of a drawer, and they needed polishing, and I made a conscious decision to make time…I needed to so something that was not urgent, not important and not necessary at all. One hour of polishing, against all plans, lead to another hour of polishing, and then another (yes, the world and my world were on hold completely during this time) until an entire drawer of silverware, not used for many Christmases, were gleaming and bright. Thoughts such as, Do I need these? Should I have these? Do I want these? Do I care? Sounds in the head that make trouble out of nothing, were left aside. Just the one impulse remained: when the world is too much with us: do just one thing. Observation: most of your thoughts, as in all of the above, are making trouble out of nothing. Mark Twain said: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

They say when you clean or polish something, a car, a piece of furniture, the floor, with full attention, you get shiny on the inside as much as the shine you achieve on the outside. But here’s the key: Do just one thing, fully, in silence. You really can rest your full attention on Just One Thing, as if your life depended on it. Someday, your life may depend on it.

We all want to be free. Here is a real kind of freedom, freedom from the constructs of the mind. So simple and so reminiscent of childhood, when life was care-free. Doing just one thing and fully being there with it. Everybody deserves to have a few minutes of carefree freedom. Like a child.

When you have shut down and shut out a whole world of trouble, you discover a whole world of reality you have aligned with and you have let in: Peace. Presence. Light. Love. Power. Joy. You have stayed in One Place and connected with One Thing. Refreshed, renewed, rejuvenated…. now you can put out the bin.

But more than that, maybe you actually have helped the plight of humanity too.

Twitter link: @AlexandraBeetle

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Photos by Claire Beynon: www.clairebeynon.com