Good Deeds and Scheduled Worrying
Have you done your Good Deed for the Day?
Every morning, between 8am and 9am, I take Arrow, my faithful, furry companion around the block for his relatively brief constitutional stroll. We often meet others undertaking the same activity – he finds (almost) all of these interactions highly positive. There is one dog though…
Almost always, he returns to the house happy, bright and, err… lighter.
Rarely, we encounter one of the roaring, hissing, whining, beeping refuse lorries entrusted by Tunbridge Wells Council to collect various kinds of rubbish from residents’ homes. Arrow regards these lorries with suspicion. They might be the monstrous creation of a marauding swarm of grey squirrels, (his natural prey), or some other awful as-yet unidentified enemy.
Today was such an occasion. I saw that he had stiffened into Level One Readiness as we drew near.
But as we walked briskly past, one of the men must have spotted I was clutching a poo bag. He stepped towards us.
“’Ere, mate. G’is that bag.”
Taken by surprise, I handed it over, so it could be lobbed into the maw of the giant lorry. I thought, what a kind gesture that man had made. He must have known that I’d shortly be putting it into the bin at the top of the driveway of my house. The entire transaction took but a few seconds. He needn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have thought any the less of him or his fellow bin men. We might just have nodded acknowledgement and gone our separate ways, none the worse.
But that little act of kindness buoyed my spirit. As I sit here, typing away in the early evening, I reflect that my outlook, my attitude to everything today has been more positive than usual. Ok, I’m normally a smiley sort of person, but I’ve felt extra smiley. I’ve been radiating happiness out of all proportion to my brief exchange with the bin man.
The episode reminds me that tiny acts of kindness towards others can have a multiplying positive effect upon their life. My own experience suggests that man might have felt a little mental boost as well having done his ‘Good Deed for the Day’. Perhaps one of many…
I’ve expressed here before my concern that anyone wishing to remain even slightly connected to the world risks mental assault, beaten down by the flood of bad news; bad behaviour; economic idiocy, greed and imminent climate catastrophe.
It’s too often depressing and worrying.
But there may be hope - Yay!! This too may have a solution. A programme on Radio 4 this morning contained a short piece about a technique invented by a Professor of Psychology at Leeds University. Daryl O’Connor suggests people should set aside a time slot during each day for worry. His experiments have shown that, with practice, participants can indeed restrict their periods of worry to a defined band of time. It does take a number of attempts to get it to work, he says, but if people persevere, they can once more enjoy restful sleep at night or relaxing activities with friends and family at other times.
Can this really work? I’m the grumpiest of
Grumpy Old Man among sceptics, but I have to give it a go. I’ll make a list now of all the things I worry about and schedule an appointment in my diary to start tomorrow.
But what time is best? And can I fit all those worries into, say, half an hour? What happens if someone does me a good deed during that period when I’m supposed to be worrying? Should I reschedule because I’m feeling too happy? If I’m concerned about the emerging Slug Banquet in my vegetable patch, should I devote the whole thirty minutes to that? And would it be best to do it at 8pm, just before the little b@$t@rds begin to feast? Or later?
Dammit. Now I have something else to worry about…