Being okay with being okay
My doctor's diagnosis: I'm normal. And paranoid.
I went to the doctor for an annual checkup recently. He always sees me coming, just after my birthday, full of foreboding fear despite generally good health.
I check all the right boxes — regular exercise, sufficient sleep, no drugs, mostly healthy diet — yet I habitually worry that the next batch of bloodwork or twinge in my back will be "the big one."
After a routine work up, my doctor shared his diagnosis: I'm normal. And paranoid.
My doctor has treated thousands of patients over a 40-year career and dubbed me a garden variety 41-year-old. Still it's hard to shake the niggling feeling that something could be wrong, must be wrong, because if I were to let down my guard surely that'd be the moment fate bursts through the door, axe in hand.
In these situations worrying can feel like power. But incessant fretting robs us of time, peace and health — the very things we're trying to preserve.
So I've been thinking about the importance of being okay with being okay.
Letting a cough just be a cough. Accepting that lower back pain is rarely lethal. Not waiting for calamity to announce itself.
Part of our always-on mindset is hardwired. Humans are excellent threat detectors. Often too good.
Perceiving external danger served our ancestors well as they scanned the horizon for figures that could bring violence or disease.
Psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner explained the evolutionary value of hyperactive awareness in a 2010 paper:
"Detecting and understanding the behaviors of agents such as animals can mean the difference between eating and becoming dinner, so it makes sense to be on the lookout out for them, even if it means mistakenly identifying nonagents as agents (Guthrie, 1993). The embarrassment you feel hopping out of the water after mistaking a wave for a shark is nothing compared to the pain of having your leg eaten after mistaking a shark for a wave. The high cost of failing to detect agents and the low cost of wrongly detecting them has led researchers to suggest that people possess a Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, a cognitive module that readily ascribes events in the environment to the behavior of agents."
These instincts are innate, but shouldn't go unchecked. We all know there is such a thing as worrying too much.
When my doctor declared that my new weight of 165 pounds was "great," I wasn't thrilled. I tried to quiet the self-recriminations, but immediately thought, "I was 142 a few years ago; how did I let this happen?" I told the doctor I'm working to find a balance of optimizing for a robust healthspan while also giving myself some leeway as a busy dad (and chocolate lover).
The doctor, gray of hair and soft of belly, shared his own philosophy: Embrace moderation and be vigilant to truly significant signals. Don't go nuts about every fluctuation, because there will be many in the future. People who age are the lucky ones.
In other words: Practice being okay with being okay. Better yet, enjoy this period of relative calm.
This was not to suggest I should careen through life blind to future difficulties. Quite the contrary. His advice reminded me of the ancient Stoics, who placed a special emphasis on hardship, even pain.
Stoicism promoted an unusual path to inner quiet in this way, encouraging adherents to contemplate the worst possible outcome (death) daily, as a way of shedding fear and savoring life.
Donald J. Robertson, longtime Stoic evangelist and All Boy guest, highlighted this:
"In one of the most poignant passages of The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius asserts the Stoic and Socratic view that true philosophy consists above all in “waiting for death with good grace”, remembering that it is merely a natural and inevitable dispersal of atoms, and not to be feared as a catastrophe (Meditations, 2.17).
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Seneca likewise imagines that we should respond to those afraid to die by saying “So are you living now?” Paradoxically, we cannot be truly “alive” when we are enslaved by fears, especially the fear of death itself (Letters, 77).
Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca didn't worship death, but they also didn't fear it. As they pondered life's inevitable end — be it today or decades away — they also freed themselves to focus on here, to appreciate the now. It reminds me of the verse in 1 Corinthians, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
There is true power in defanging fear.
After my dad died in 2023, I found myself thinking a lot about death. We drew up our will and trust. I never skipped another hug or "I love you." I've found it's hard to be paralyzed by fear when you're taking action.
So my goal is to get more comfortable with the unknown. Settle in and appreciate life's waves.
Full hearts and clear minds do a body good as tides rise and fall.