I have arrived all in one piece after all :)

People say worrying is sort of like making yourself suffer twice. Perhaps depends on the type of worrying? One is where you worry about something with no intent to do anything. Almost as an excuse or avoidance of actual activity. A bit like complaining. There's the bad kind where complaining is an end in itself. There is also the good kind that points out what's wrong as a starting point for a solution. Not to indefinitely wallow in it.

I started thinking about this difference because in a very concrete instance my 'worrying' led me in a positive direction. It generally does but in this instance the evidence was stark. At Manchester airport, I was asked if I want to get my checked-in bags in Beijing or directly at my final destination in China. I have travelled about three times to this destination so far and every time I was told I had to get my bags in Beijing and then check them in again. I was never given an option. But this was the first time I was travelling by a Chinese airline and even though it wasn't the same Chinese airline as my connecting one, the situation was different enough for options to be different. However, I was obviously 'worried' so I double/triple checked this information and each time the official told me the same thing. On the flight I couldn't let go of my worries. My mind refused to settle. A part of me was mad at myself for worrying in spite of official information that should be accurate. When I landed in Beijing and saw the baggage carousel, I had the urge to enquire again. That was quite difficult because of the thick language barrier. To my surprise and not-surprise in a way, it turned out I absolutely had to get my bags off in Beijing. What followed was 3-4 hours’ madness because my bags did not turn up with all the other luggage and the airport officers had to get hold of the airline folks to locate my bags. Which they did finally in some transfer hold!

When I got to a different terminal much later in the day to check in the same bags again for the domestic flight, the counter official seemed confused. She asked if I had two more bags because the system showed two checked-in bags. I explained the whole story to her. When the matter got resolved, the big question on my mind was: Would it have been okay if I had never taken out my bags at this airport? Would they have gone to the domestic airport anyway? Did my worry actually create this hullabaloo? She said no, there was no way they would have been sent through. I was supposed to take them through Customs at Beijing. That in a rather odd way was good to hear. It meant that my worry actually saved the day! In a way I think what I am calling ‘worry’ is a niggling intuition that is trying to warn me of something, not in a magical way, but based on subconscious processing of past and present patterns of data. My distrust of authoritative information is also helpful because my intuition does not blindly accept such information.

For all that I have to say that people who do not incessantly 'worry' (or process data constantly intuitively) may get into predictable difficulties or face negative outcomes more often but they probably live an easier or happier life. In my case I might predict where things are headed and avoid foreseeable bumps maybe, but at a huge ongoing cost...

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'Death arrives; it would be a thing to dread, if it could remain with you. But death must either not come at all, or else must come and pass away.' ~ The Epistles of Seneca, Epistle IV