We can learn endless lessons from nature if we pay attention. The top of a mountain teaches us perspective and helps us see our challenges from a new vantage point. Trees show us scale—we feel small inside a vast pine forest and consider that maybe our problems are, too. 

What about waterfalls?

Think about the last time you saw one. How many years did you live before you got acquainted with those particular falls that thundered before you? How few minutes did it take to walk away, to turn your attention back to the more important task, the current worry, whatever it was occupying a larger share of your mind? 

And yet, these massive water bodies have been rushing since before you were born, and will continue long after you’re gone. All this time, the water has been moving forward. All this time, while you were sleeping and working and laughing and learning what it means to be you. 

You haven’t been here long enough to witness the beginning of that motion.

(When does a waterfall start, anyway?) 

You’ll likely leave this world before it’s over.

(And how does a waterfall end?) 

Your witnessing of the waterfall has no influence on whether or not it exists. 

In this way, the waterfall reminds you of what you often forget, which is that dwelling on a thing doesn’t make it change, or go away, or remain in the state in which you imagine it, no matter how fiercely you replay the thought. Instead, giving something your time and attention only does one thing: it assigns a kind of false value where maybe there is none. 

Did you know that worry is not just a mental state, but also a physical action? 

The dictionary says that to worry also means “to touch or disturb something repeatedly.”

Worrying in all its forms is a disturbance. When you’re in conversation with the person you love and the restaurant is too loud and he asks, Where did you go? because he knows you well enough to see that you’re no longer in the conversation, or the room, or even that moment in time, you know you are disturbing one of the only purely good things you have.

You dwell on the past because part of you hopes this will help you find a solution that will finally fix it. If you often think of the people you’ve lost to the disease of addiction, for instance, maybe you can remember the hidden key to mending them, to helping them hear the words, You matter to me.

You dwell on the future, too. If you think of the things you want that other people have—your own house, more money, apparent happiness in both leisure and vocation—maybe you can unlock the puzzle to what has long felt out of reach. 

Whether you worry about the past or the present doesn’t make a difference.

All worry is weight.

You know by now that the tragedies you’ve endured will always take up a significant lot in your mind. But the conflicts and frustrations; your day-to-day mistakes? There are many more of those in life than there are tragedies.

This means you have permission to decide if that incessantly annoying thing knocking around your mind is indeed trivial, if you will devalue it and move it to the cobweb-filled attic in your memory, along with the name of that stranger you kissed at a bar in Belgium on Valentine’s Day when you were twenty, and the reason you were so mad at your sister you ruined her favorite pants in a way that now makes you both laugh, and the outfit you stressed over wearing to a high school dance, and all the other things you’ve forgotten throughout your life.

Because at some point, they no longer mattered. 

You can’t control what happens to you, not fully. Anxiety, mental health, the difficulties of life—these make it hard not to worry. But you do have agency over the part of your mind that decides what is important. How you do this, or whether you think about it at all, will not change the fact that time is pushing you toward that certain end, where the river of life crests and turns into mist, after which it will continue without you.

So I ask you, worrier, with the greatest amount of care: When you finally reach that shimmering edge, what will you carry?

For more of my writing, read these recent publications from around the web:

• For SLATE, I wrote about a rat-infested yoga teacher training that taught me a lot more than I bargained for.

• For Explore Magazine, I wrote about a press trip to the Pacific Northwest, visiting a non-alcoholic taproom, and why the outdoors are better without booze.