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Chris was worried. ‘I am worried,’ he said several times without stopping. Chris was always worried. He worried about silly things, things that wouldn’t happen. ‘Or would they?’ said Chris to himself. Chris’s friends didn’t worry like Chris. ‘After all,’ they said, ‘what use is worrying? It doesn’t do any good.’ Chris repeated this to himself several times. ‘It doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t do any good.’ But it didn’t do any good: he was still worried.
Chris started reading books on worrying. They had titles like Stop Worrying in 24 Hours – 24 Exercises to Manage Your Worries, Stop Worrying in 6 Minutes – It Will Be Fine!, and Find the Source of Your Worry and Sort It Out by Next Saturday. But after he read them, he was still worried. He read other sorts of books, to stop him worrying about the books to help him stop worrying that hadn’t worked. In these books, instead of worrying, people did quests to find things and sort things out. So he decided to go on a quest. He would find his worry and sort himself out.
Then he started to worry about where to start. Did it need to be somewhere near or far? In the books, ‘far’ was favoured. Very often it was very far indeed: an ocean or a mountain or a land faraway, at least a train journey or even an aeroplane. As he thought about it, he got lots of butterflies. ‘On second thoughts,’ he thought, ‘I wonder if I could find the source of my worry and fix it without going far away.’
So he began to dig a hole.
In the hole, he found dozens of worries waiting. Some of them were shiny and bright like precious stones; others were brown and dull like worms. Actually, they were worms. ‘I wonder if worms have worries,’ he thought. ‘Of course we do,’ he thought the worms said. ‘So everything worries,’ he concluded. But he was wrong. Of course worms and stones don’t worry. Chris was just being stupid. So he climbed out of the hole and filled it in.
That night Chris slept like he hadn’t slept since he was…well, since he was alive, he thought. When he woke up, he thought all his worries were gone. ‘Maybe I buried them in that hole,’ he thought. But he was wrong. They were still there, and they were a little bit stronger now.
So Chris took drugs, and his worries went, but then so did the oak wood behind his house, his collection of scuttles, the sky above his head, and eventually the rest of the world. This was too high a price to pay, he thought, and he stared up at the sky that was no longer there and worried.
Here is Chris on his back staring up at the ?. He is lying on the road, and the traffic has stopped waiting for the world to come back. The butterflies have evacuated his stomach and have settled inside his head. Of course he’s worried! Who wouldn’t be in such a situation? He might do something silly!!!!! ‘Oh no, that’s silly, I am already worrying about silly things. I can’t do something silly as well,’ he said out loud so that the drivers of the cars heard.
The drivers thought Chris was very brave. They cheered and clapped and blew their horns. ‘What a fine fellow Chris is to have stopped worrying about silly things and not to do anything silly. Now we will also stop worrying about silly things or doing anything silly.’
So the whole world stopped worrying or doing anything silly, the sky came back bluer than ever, Chris’s scuttle collection recollected, the cars pulled away, and
either missed Chris by a whisker or
flattened him into the road, killing him dead.
You choose. Either way Chris has stopped worrying.
July 17, 2023