Between my sophomore and junior year at college，a chance came up for me to spend the summer vacation working on a ranch in Argentina. My roommate’s father was in the cattle business, and he wanted Ted to see something of it.  Ted said he would go if he could take a friend, and he chose me. The idea of spending two months on the fabled Argentina pampas was exciting. Then I began have second thoughts. I had sort something outnever been very far from England, and I had been homesick my first few weeks at college. What would it be like in a strange country? What about the language? And besides, I had promised to teach my younger brother to sail that summer. The more I thought about it, the more the prospect daunted me. I began waking up nights in sweat.
In the end, I turn down the proposition. As soon as Ted asked somebody else to go, I began kicking myself. A couple of weeks later I went home to my old summer job, unpacking cartons at the local supermarket, feeling very low. I had turn down something I wanted to do because I was scared, and had ended up feeling depressed. I stayed that way for a long time. And it didn’t help when I went back college in the fall to discover that Ted and his friend had had a terrific time.
In the long run that unhappy summer taught me a valuable lesson out of which I developed a rule for myself: do what makes you anxious; don’t do what makes you depressed.
I am not, of cause, talking about severe states of anxious, which require medical attention. What I mean is that kind of anxiety we call state fright, butterflies in the stomach, a case of nerves- the feelings we have at a job interview, when we are giving a big party, when we have to make an important presentation at the office. And the kind of depression I am referring to is that downhearted feeling of blues, when we don’t seem to be interested in anything, when we can’t going and seem to have no energy.
I was confronted by this sort of situation toward the end of my senior year. As graduation approached, I began to think about taking a crack at making my living as a writer. But one of my professors was urging me to apply to graduate school and aim at a teaching career. I wavered. The idea of trying to live by writing was a lot more scary than spending a summer on the pampas, I thought. Back and forth I went, making my decision, unmaking it. Suddenly, I realized that every time I give up the idea of writing, that sinking feeling went through me; it gave me the blues.
The thought of graduate school wasn’t what depressed me. It was giving up on what deep in my gut I really wanted to do. Right then I learned another lesson. To avoid that kind of depression meant, inevitably, having to endure a certain amount of worry and concern.
The great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard believe that anxiety always arisen when we confront the possibility of our own development. It seems to be a rule of life that you can’t advance without getting that old, familiar, jittery feeling.
Even as children we discover this when we try to expand ourselves by, say, learning to ride a bike or going out for the school play. Later in life we get butterflies when think about having that first child, or uprooting the family from the old hometown to find a better opportunity halfway across the country. Any time, it seems, that we set out aggressively to get something we want, we meet up with anxiety. And it’s going to be our traveling companion, at least part of the way, into any new venture.
    When I first began writing magazine articles, I was frequently required to interview big names-people like Richard Burton, Joan Rivers, sex authority Williams Master, baseball-gr
eat Dizzy Dean. Before each interview I would get butterflies and my hands would shake.
    At the time, I was doing some writing about music. And one person I particularly admired was the great composer Duke Ellington. On state and on television, he seemed the very model of confident, sophisticated man of the world. Then I learned that Ellington still get state fright. If the highly honored Duke Ellington, who had appeared on the bandstand some 10,000 times over 30 years, had anxiety attacks, who was I to think I could avoid them? I went on doing those frightening interviews, and one day, as I was getting onto a plane for Washington to interview columnist Joseph Alsop, I suddenly realized to my astonishment that I was looking forward to the meeting. What had happened to these butterflies? 
    Well, in truth, they were still there, but there were fewer of them. I had benefited, I discovered, from a process psychologists call “extinction”. If you put an individual in an anxiety-provoking situation often enough, he will eventually to learn that there isn’t anything to be worried about.
    Which brings us to a corollary to my basic rule: you’ll never eliminate anxiety by avoiding the things that caused it.
I remember how my son Jeff was when I first began to teach him to swim at the lake cottage where we spend our summer vacations. He resisted, and when I got him into the water he sank and sputtered and wanted to quit. But I was insistent. And by summer’s end he was splashing around like a puppy. He had “extinguished” his anxiety the only way he could-by confronting it. The problem, of cause, is that it is one thing to urge somebody else to take on those anxiety-producing challenges; it is quite another to get ourselves to do it.

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