Last night, as I visited the park near my house, walking on a piece of tubular climbing webbing cinched to tension between two trees, I realized how much I worry about stupid stuff.  Stuff like "Where will I be in a year?" or "Will my history degree actually mean anything?" I focused on the tree and the moment, doing my best to smoothly link turns on the 1/2" thick slack line. After a brief break to do some journaling and realizing I had nothing to say, the picnic table a few yards away looked like a splendid place from which to view a sunset.  The sunset only made me worry and think more.  As my iPod played mostly worship songs, I stared blankly, alternating between the colors of the sunset and the movement of the grass that blew in the breeze.  

I put my slack line away, keeping an eye on the sunset.  It was in many ways ridiculous that something so beautiful could cause such tension in the moments in which it was viewed.  My music failed to distract me from the thoughts of anxiety, up until one particular song came on. I smiled and cranked it as far as I could without feeling like I was going to blow my headphones in half.  

Anxiety is a choice. It basically comes down to whether or not we trust God enough to get us through things that may or may not be affected by our futile attempts to change our circumstances.  It's a hard choice to make, at least for me.  But at the moment that Listening to Levon by Marc Cohn popped up on my playlist, I was over it. Worrying will not stop something from happening.  You won't live any longer by worrying about some minute detail of tomorrow.  And I was done, at least for that moment.

I turned off and threw my phone across the park, which was mostly symbolic of my mindset because I picked it up when I left, put it in my bag, and didn't look at it the rest of the night.