I was musing the other day about the similarity between worry and cholesterol.

Used to be obvious; cholesterol, that's just plain bad stuff, right? Well, as it turns out, there's two kinds of cholesterol - there's the familiar "bad stuff," and there's another, good kind.

Once I was going through a rough patch, talking it over with a friend, and mentioned I worried about some things. "Worry's just a bad habit" was his response. So I thought about it, and mostly I could see his point. You got a problem, and all you do is worry about it, what good is it? But wait. There's actually two kinds of worry, too.

Worrying about whether everybody's doing OK, now, that's a pretty good kind of worry. You're likely to act on it, help people you see having trouble, and maybe we'll all come out of it better in the end. Then there's the bad kind of worry. That's worrying about whether someone else is doing better than you. Like that person was caught saying on TV during a civil rights kafuffle - "If we're not better than them, who are we better than?"

If you're worried about whether someone else is making out better than you are, and you act on it, the likely outcome is that everyone, yourself included, will come out worse. And like the old fellow who claimed not to be a philosopher said, when asked to sum up what he'd learned in his life, "Everyone does better when everyone does better."

Worry and cholesterol. There's two kinds. One good, one bad.