I WORRIED

I worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And I gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

Mary Oliver

I am a worrier too. At sixty-one, there are more things to worry about, the past, the future, not to mention the present. In particular, I am a professional in terms of projecting my worries into the future. I can’t help it but that is how I learned to navigate the unknown world in front of me. I also worry about aging moms, grown-up children, our well-being and health, and our friends.

Oliver addresses our helpless worries of nature in the first stanza. Helpless because there is very little we can do to help gravity and other forces of nature. I suppose the point is we worry even about the things we have very little control over.

The short second stanza reflects on our tendency to worry about the impact of our past. Does it matter whether we were right or wrong? How about in the areas of the need for forgiveness that are precisely beyond our control?

The next two stanzas unpack the future worrying fixations that may or may not have legitimacy and stem from family medical history. They range from Oliver’s simple but precious desire to sing to the possibility of more serious disease. Dementia would be the most terrible disease to a poet.

The word “finally” turns the entire poem. What follows is the realizations and actions in the past tense as is captured in the poem’s title, I Worried. The decisive verbs packed a punch after punch: saw, gave up, took, went out, and sang. The word “sang” is the redemptive reversal or the cancellation of her precise worry of hopeless singing. WHO CARES! Really, “I don’t care anymore” won the day followed by freedom. Oliver invites us to consider what we will act on to “reverse” our incessant worries.

I, too, want to be a “singer” of freedom—freedom from worrying about the past and especially the future. With admissible reasons to be worrisome in all societies and families, as all are fighting great battles, how about we join together in getting up, getting out, and shouting to the world that we are alive?

I imagine Oliver exclaiming among the trees, impressing the morning birds of all kinds. . . And so can you. . .