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The Guardian had an essay about an anti-worrying trick that I clicked on because I, as a world-class worrier, am a sucker for any anti-worrying trick.

The “trick” is that you do not allow yourself to worry past 6:30 pm, so your brain has about 12 hours (to 6:30 am) not to worry. You don’t immediately go cold turkey and not worry at all for 12 hours. You tell yourself you can’t worry from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm, and keep pushing it back an hour. And then you’re asleep for a large chunk of the hours. So… it probably works.

Except I couldn’t see how I could make myself not worry in a certain time window if my brain was still actively thinking. The only way it could work is if I lied to myself and said, “There is nothing wrong,” which is the adult version of telling a kid who is crying, “You’re alright.”

Because yes, it is true. The crying kid is alright. Yes, they have a skinned knee. Yes, something freaked them out. But in the grand scheme of things, they are alright. They are safe. They are cared for. They have food and water and shelter. (Assuming they have all of these things.) And for the adult, unless you are actively going through a crisis (and not worrying about the potential for a crisis), there is nothing wrong. There will be wrong things in the future (not just potentially, but it is inevitable that we will all go through wrong stretches), but in the immediate moment, there is nothing wrong. Between 6:30 pm and 6:30 am, I don’t have to worry about the potential problems.

Maybe it will work? Jury is out on this one.

I read this on Modern Mrs. Darcy, and I can’t tell whether I believe it to be true. The title: “Nobody loves a city like someone who wasn’t born there.” She writes,

Only someone who chose a place can see it that way. Only someone who fell in love with it from the outside can maintain that kind of unmarked appreciation. There’s a kind of love you can only give to a city you chose to fall for.

Is that true? I don’t have a complicated love for where I grew up. I don’t feel that it’s a “complicated love. Heavy love. Love that comes with the suffocation of performing someone else’s dreams in a city that never gave you room to breathe.” It’s actually pretty simple and straightforward. I liked growing up here enough to stay around here.

On the other hand, I also feel a lightness every time we go to London. We collectively love it as a family, and I can feel myself unravel and relax in multiple places: Stepping out of the Gloucester Road Underground station, walking alongside St. James Park on The Mall, sitting down on a bench at the Tower of London, sitting down at a table at Da Mario’s. Do Londoners love it as much as I love it? I have no clue — I’m not in their head. But I fell in love with that city and can ignore the city traits that I hold against other cities, such as New York. Exact same thing can occur in both cities, and in London, it’s charming, and in New York, I seethe.

What do you think about falling in love with a place?

I took a mental health day yesterday to read books and sit with my guinea pig, so it’s a little hard to get back into the swing of things today because there’s a part of my brain that says, “Oh, that felt so nice yesterday. Why don’t you do it again?”

But get back into it again I must because there is work to do and cooking to accomplish. Pesach begins tonight, and I have to prep for two seders. And amid it all, I need to not open social media and believe anything I read because it’s also April Fool’s Day.

That’s your yearly reminder not to believe the fake pregnancy announcements. I wish people wouldn’t write them.

It occurred to me this week that if we were about to celebrate our 25th anniversary, and I met Josh when I was 25, and we dated for a while before getting married, that at some point in the past year or so, I moved over the boundary between being together with Josh longer than not being together with Josh.

There’s a line I love in One Day that goes:

“Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.” (p. 239)

It can, of course, be taken in two different ways. The casual meaning implies that they have known each other since childhood. They grew up in the same town or went to the same school.

But there is another meaning, the one that is clear to the book reader. They had to figure out this whole growing-up thing, and they figured it out together. They had ups and downs since college, highs and lows, wins and losses, and they put it all together into a whole truth: They both emotionally grew over the many years they were together. And they couldn’t have done it with this particular result without the other one.

That’s how I feel about Josh. We met each other when we were fairly young, just figuring things out in new adulthood. And we grew up together.

I feel so lucky that I got to step over that line and have him in my life longer than without. Here’s to making this new side, this with side, infinitely wide.

I read a fascinating article on the BBC about delivery people who serve almost as default social workers, checking in on people as they bring yogurt to people’s homes.

On paper they’re delivery workers, but in practice they’re part of the country’s informal social safety net. In a country grappling with a rapidly ageing population and a deepening loneliness crisis, Yakult Ladies have become an unlikely source of community, helping to reduce the problem of isolation one drop-off at a time.

It’s not just reducing isolation. They end up being almost a front-line worker:

The maternal figures offer a friendly face, weekly check-ins and, for many older residents, a lifeline of human connection. They also notice subtle changes in a customer’s routine. If someone fails to answer the door, they may alert family members or seek assistance.

I think about how different it is here, where items are often left outside and the delivery person texts to let you know it’s at the door. I love this idea of people keeping the same routine, the same houses, year after year. Having the exchange be a societal check:

Are you okay?

I’m okay.