THE FUSE

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier—until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don’t end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time. The things I didn’t worry about, I didn’t anticipate—and so I wasn’t prepared. This is one reason we are so captivated by the future.