FLY AWAY, SWINE FLU

I posted an entry yesterday about the swine flu (for some reason, I keep wanting to say "sline fwu") and how I'm trying not to worry about it, but something about the entry didn't feel right. I couldn't figure out what it was that didn't feel right until later that evening, when I watched a movie set during the Holocaust. Seeing scenes of concentration camps and thinking about all the people whose lives were either taken from them or made completely, irrevocably terrible (the word "terrible" doesn't really suffice, in my mind, when it comes to one's children being murdered), feeling the anger I always feel when I think about the injustices committed against the Jews and so many other people then, made me realize all the more that my problems are pretty small. And although yesterday's blog entry more or less said I wasn't worrying, it didn't say it loudly enough. Therefore:

FLY AWAY, SLINE FWU! I'M NOT WORRIED ABOUT YOU!

I got caught up in a period of intense "mortality worrying" after Lula was born, mostly due to the fact that I now had a little person whose life and happiness depended on mine, but also due to the fact that I was smoking pot and it was making me paranoid. That period, marked by unwarranted doctor's visits and teary breakdowns, taught me something useful: that worrying is a waste of time.

Not many of us know exactly when we're going to die. And even if we're more concerned about the effect our untimely death would have on our children's lives than on the fact that we'd be missing out on a lot of fun, worrying about all the things that could go wrong doesn't do anyone much good. Frankly, it's more fun to be relaxed than to constantly be on the lookout for threats and risks, and although being eternally careful and cautious might help you sometime to some degree, at what cost? What kind of life is a life spent worrying?

It's a wasted life! And the doctor will really think you're crazy if you make another appointment because of your "little bumps"! So you shouldn't worry about the fline swu and all the other bad things that haven't happened to you yet and probably never will.

If you need something else to think about, and the Holocaust, although it makes your problems seem small, in fact makes you more depressed, you could think about your parents' recent visit. They stayed with you--sleeping on the 5-year-old's floor--for almost two weeks, playing and fixing and cleaning and cooking and generally making things even brighter and better and more beautiful. They injected a big dose of love and happiness into your life that makes you smile when you open the (now very neat) linen closet and the freezer (where tupperwares of tomato soup wait patiently); when you hang laundry on the new clothesline strung across the patio or look at the big bouquet of gladiolus on the coffee table, you can almost pretend they're here with you, looking for their glasses and telling you, in so many ways, there's nothing to worry about.