Day-tight Compartments: Anxiety & “What Am I Supposed To Do” Happened

Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past – the dead yesterdays.  Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future – the unborn tomorrows.  Then you are safe – safe for today!  . . . Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead . . . Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dust death . . . The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried, makes the strongest falter.  Shut off the future as tightly as the past . . . The future is today . . . . There is no tomorrow.  The day man’s salvation is now.  Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future . . . Shut close, then, the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of a life of ‘day-tight-compartments.’ ” – Dale Carnegie

When I read this a few days ago, I had weight lift off my shoulders.  It was a vortex of melancholy.  I was sitting on my bed, hunched over, and these thoughts started bearing down on me.  I get worked up when jobs send me jobs, stay quiet for about a week, then I have to ask them, “what happened?”  and when I do, they say “sorry, they chose another teacher.”

This is very infuriating, as what I’ve said a many times before, so I took charge.  I decided to email them back and I went on a clean, concise rant before blocking the email.

I won’t sit around and weight for people to choose me at the end of the stick because of obvious reasons.

I woke up the next morning and said, “what have I done?!”  But, in the end, did I want to work for a place like that anyways? Absolutely not.

So what did I do? I was succumbed by worry – worry that didn’t make any sense.  I look at my bank accounts and say, “I’m actually pretty good right now.”  I look at my income for this month, and I’m actually in a pretty good surplus.  So what the hell is it that I’m worried about?

The Future

I had to revert to the manual.  The future, and thinking about all the what ifs, will drive us insane.  It drives a lot of people to insanity, depression, and death.  As all of you have heard a many of times, we can only control the things that are happening at that moment – nothing else.  We get so caught up in the “what’s going to happen next month? I don’t have anything coming up? Omg. I’m in trouble!” However, this has happened so much in terms of my life even back in Australia.

I was a dental temp and boy, during the Christmas holidays, I was completely out of money.  I had all my money in an account I had no access to and banks were closed for like 2 weeks.  Not only that, but being a dental temp, a lot of offices are on vacation.  It picked back-up (obviously after Christmas), but my life was never in real danger, nor is it here (given the fact that expenses are much cheaper).  I know what I’m doing and I know where I’m going in life right now, so the goal is to stay focused.

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