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Why can the mind always find another reason to worry?
Imagine a torch moving around a dark room. Wherever its beam lands, it finds something: a coat that could be a person, a window that may be unlocked, a sound that needs explaining. Checking one corner does not switch off the torch. It simply sends the beam somewhere else.
Worry can work like a search with no finish line. One concern is answered, relief arrives briefly, and then the same question points somewhere else: What have I missed?
A Spark from The Vision
If you look for them, you will find an endless list of reasons to worry and not be happy.
Suppose you submit an application. First you worry that the file did not upload. You check the receipt and see that it did. Then you worry that you attached the wrong version. You open it and find the right one. Then a sentence looks weak. Then the deadline seems unclear. Then you wonder what every other applicant wrote.
Each check answers one concern. None can answer the larger demand underneath them: Make sure nothing can go wrong. Life cannot supply that guarantee, so the search keeps creating new work.
Useful checking has an end. You decide what needs to be checked, what result will be enough, and when new information will make another action possible. The receipt confirms the upload. Opening the attachment confirms the version. After that, the application waits for a decision.
Worry resists that ending because stopping can feel careless. Another search offers one more moment of relief and the promise that complete certainty might be hiding in the next corner. But the next corner creates another corner.
Give the search a stopping condition before you begin it: I will check the attachment once. If the receipt is present, this task is finished until I receive a reply. A new fact can reopen the decision. Repeating the same search without one cannot complete it.
The dark room still has corners. The change is that the torch can rest after it has shown you what you came to see.
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AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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