Walls Against Worry

I don't remember being very worried about things like how to pay the rent or buy food when I was a young woman, say in my 20s.  I've always been a worrier, so there were things I worried about, but the basic necessities of life weren't among them. Apparently I just always assumed they would be taken care of...somehow.

Now that I'm older, however, I find that I worry a lot less about things like nuclear war and a lot more about the cost of utilities.  I'm not sure if that's because my world has grown smaller and now the price of a loaf of bread is about all I can focus on or if there simply is a higher state of worry and tension about everyday life now in the world in general.

Or, and this is a third possibility, it may be that having lost my mother, who had been the foundation of my life for my entire life, now everything feels precarious and tenuous. I feel the fragility of life more keenly now and the awareness of the passage of my own days presses close much of the time.

I wonder if I feel this more since I had my mother a longer time than many people; she was 92 when she died. Would I still feel this way if she had died when I was in my 20s or 30s? I don't know. Right now all I know is that I have to put up walls against worry and even when the walls are in place, I have to examine them daily for chinks.

And now, on an entirely different topic, after years of editing in AP and CMS, I'm now learning APA style. Old dog, new trick