Worm Question, Reimagined

David Shrigley, The Worms are Heros.

I’m thinking about how worms are so hopeful in the Florida heat when it rains, crawling out from their hiding spots, braving to cross across the sidewalks, cement, and asphalt, in hopes of reaching new lands, only to die mid-journey from the sudden return of the oppressing heat and sunshine. Shriveled they lay, martyrs of hope. Do I envy them, do I pity them? They mustn't know what high odds of horrible fate lie ahead for them when they venture out of their usual dwellings. To live a life like that — blissfully unaware of what blunders could await you — is it a freedom or an blind march towards probable death? Is it better to know what perils could await you?

This foretold knowledge of the future sounds a lot like anxiety - constantly imagining a million different bad scenarios in hopes that you are prepared to face any and all of them. In all my years of anxious rumination, I don’t think I could tell you that it actually served the purpose it purports. Imagining these bad outcomes, in truth, doesn’t actually prepare you for how to act after they happen. I can imagine the scenario, all the scenarios, but after whatever my first action is, the rest relies on factors that lie outside myself. Of course the brain can imagine these millions of outside factors too, you can go on imagining scenarios from a single original scenario until you're blue in the face, as they grow almost factorially and eventually infinitely. 

Within all these infinities, surely there must be a handful of positive outcomes, somewhere in the haystack. But why bother looking for the few needles when there’s all this hay to worry about, right? 

What if instead, I imagined a million good outcomes and only a few bad ones? What if I flipped everything on its head, turned the world upside, my brain backwards, my thoughts inside out? What would my days look like, the inside of  my mind, my actions? 

I imagine that I would move forward with less fear and more excitement. Less frozen rigidity, more eager movement. Am I just writing in vague and imaginative ways about what CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is? It’s so embarrassing to realize time and time again how living is just experiencing things and then thinking yourself into oblivion until you eventually stumble upon an idea or concept that already exists, but that took all that fiddling, fudging, and fooling around until you can actually make use of those ideas yourself. 

I’ll accept it though. I’ll take the mistakes, the regrets, the fruitless endeavors. If I had listened to all the advice that adults gave me growing up instead of making mistakes and failing forward, I’d be a totally different person. I’d be a sum of other people’s mistakes instead of my own. 

So I guess the question isn’t “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” but rather, “Do I want to be the worm and go forth unbridled?”.  

(Also, yes worms actually can learn, I am clearly projecting this boundlessness upon worms, but allow me to indulge. You can read about worm learning here.)