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Why am I so worried about being late?

Why am I filled with anxiety?

Is it for fear of making people wait

That I worry so about being late?

Is my need for control so great

That it threatens my emotional sobriety?

All I know is that I worry about being late

So much that I’m filled with anxiety.

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I wrote this poem (for those who care, it’s called a “triolet”) last month while on retreat, after realizing during my morning meditation that my stomach was clenched and my heart was racing because I feared being a minute or so late to the morning service at the monastery guest house. And that “a minute or so late” didn’t mean getting there a minute or two after the service had started, but a minute or two after the time I’d intended to get there, which was ten minutes before the service started.

I can see how stupid what I just wrote must sound to an ordinary person. But, as I realized on the retreat—possibly for the first time in 80 years—when it comes to needing to be early, I’m not ordinary.

Some of my earliest memories are of waking up an hour ahead of when I needed to on a school day and lying in the dark, worrying about everything from whether or not Buddy Gallant, one of the playground bullies, would twist my arm behind my back until I cried, to whether the fact that I still couldn’t ride a two-wheeled bicycle meant I had polio, like my cousin Frankie, who had to wear a leg brace, to how my family was going to afford to buy me another pair of shoes.

And yet, despite my fears of what might happen on the playground, I was always one of the first kids to arrive at school, establishing a pattern that continued for the next seventy years. When I started playing basketball at the town’s rec program, I would arrive at the gymnasium a good half hour early, often shuffling my feet outside the locked door to keep warm. When I began dating, I was always early, pacing or in a chair tapping my foot, which often got the evening off to a poor start. For 32 years, I was always one of the first teachers to arrive at school.

Back to the present, Mary Lee and I usually arrive at a movie, a concert, or a play twenty to thirty minutes early. I’m usually the first to get to our Men’s Group and the first to open any Zoom link. When I do a reading or a program based on the book I’m trying to market (The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey, for anyone reading this blog for the first time), I want to be there at the very least thirty minutes ahead of time. Forty-five minutes is better.

So what’s going on?

When in question, Google. Where, when I looked up “being early,” I found all kinds of positive stuff: being early is a sign of showing responsibility, of being conscientious. A sign of respect. Of leadership. And I like to think that’s often true of me. As a teacher, I used the extra time at school to prepare both my classroom and me for the day ahead. And when I’m doing a reading these days, I find it helpful to grow accustomed to the room—figure out how far I will have to project my voice. I want to respect the services at the monastery by not wandering in late. I arrive at Men’s Group early not only because I want to set up the equipment for our hybrid in person/Zoom meetings, but also because my name is on the church program as being the facilitator for the group, and I want to be dependable.

But when I looked up “fear of being late,” I found a different set of characteristics. First off, fear of being late has a name: allegrophobia, which, at least one writer thinks, may be connected to Responsibility OCD, or Inflated Responsibility Perfectionism. Allegrophobia, some websites say, is a sign of anxiety, codependence, and a deep-seated need for control. Other sites say allegrophobes worry obsessively about looming deadlines, relationship conflicts, and a sense that time is slipping away.

Which, I realized, are the same characteristics describing those of us who grew up in alcoholic or dysfunctional families.

Which answers a lot of questions.

For example, why did I worry as a kid about my parents—one, an adult child of a raging alcoholic and the other growing up in a broken home—not being able to afford new shoes? Because I often heard my parents worrying about their money problems. They also worried about a lot of other things, and I wonder if I channeled their anxiety into my fears of being taunted on the playground or coming down with polio. At the same time, was the reason I left early to school, basketball practice, and the like because I wanted to get out of the house and leave those worries behind?

If so, I’ve never been able to do it, so that I need to leave early for the movies because I’m afraid something will delay me between my house and the movie theater a mile away. Being early for school and to my readings and the Men’s Group helps me feel in control. And, as a codependent, being dependable and conscientious is not as important to me as having you think I’m dependable and conscientious.  

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I suppose, at my age, I could just accept my allegrophobia. (And allegro, by the way, is a musical tempo that means very fast—124 to 160 beats per minute, which often describes my heart rate when I think I’m going to be late.)

But last week, I learned of the Judaic concept that upon reaching 70, one is considered having led a full life, but not necessarily a complete one. And as I thought of how I might make my life more complete, I thought again of my fear of being late. I did some more traveling on the internet and found a few suggestions for turning what has always been an anxious journey into a pilgrimage toward completeness.

One recommendation echoes what every spiritual tradition I know teaches: instead of worrying about the future, focus on the present moment. If you have a Higher Power, concentrate on how what some of us call God sees you instead of on how you think other people see you. If you don’t have a Higher Power, at least pause during your fears to center on your breathing.

Another suggestion I found is to imagine worse case scenarios, which sounds counterproductive, but is, I expect, a little like a vaccination, where you receive a little of the disease to protect yourself from more serious sickness. Ask yourself, “so what?” Imagine you are a few minutes late. So what? Will the Brothers at SSJE stop their service and give you hell? Will the Men’s Group fall apart if we start at 8:03 instead of 8:00?

And a third suggestion is to purposefully arrive at a gathering a minute or so late.

Aargh! Not ready for that one. Just writing that sentence gave me heartburn. I think I’d better work on the other suggestions first.

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