Marisa has a book she uses with kids when counselling called "The Huge Bag of Worries". A little girl carries a huge sack with her all day, filled with everything she's concerned about, her worries. Every hour of every day another worry goes into the bag and it gets a bit heavier.
This might sound very familiar to you, for a long time I used to feel like I was carrying this bag, at the end of the day, my shoulders would ache and I would be exhausted.
The bag of worries will continue to get bigger until you choose to do something about it.
Once you unzip the bag, alone or in the presence of a kindly old woman as in the story (you get to choose your own old woman by the way, my Dad is a particular favourite choice of mine), a lot of the worries will disappear.
Many of your worries don’t like the light of day, they’re pretty manageable once you’ve talked them through with someone.
Several of the worries may be someone else’s, they’re not you’re responsibility so you don’t need to carry them.
There may be one or two left and you know what, that’s fine. A life of responsibility will always have a couple of worries, I can deal with that.
Sometimes it takes reading a kids book to make plain what we fail to make sense of as adults.
Blog: 42
Comments