Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes,

Today’s wife can feel overwhelmed with worries over bills, work, elderly parents, her children, world happenings, and the state of her own marriage. And a woman can think, “I’m worrying myself sick over this, but I can’t help it!” The subject of the Understanding Marriage! class on Saturday, Oct. 13, will be: “Is the Way a Wife Worries Useful or Hurtful?”

This down-to-earth and cultural event will be taught by Aesthetic Realism consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, and will take place from 11 am to 12:30 pm. Women will be learning that there is a criterion for how to worry, and a beneficial, even a beautiful, way to worry that will have a wife feel proud and able to respect herself. There will be discussion of these clarifying sentences from a 1966 lecture by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism:

There are some things that it is quite clear one should worry about. How to worry: that is something else. There are ailments to worry about, and money, love, domesticity. They get mingled, because a person may worry on the same day about her husband and about a carpenter, and then about whether she really understood Edith Wharton….The biggest thing we’re worried about is something we don’t know we’re worried about: most people don’t say, “I don’t care enough for things not myself.”

Women will learn that what makes the way a wife worries either useful or hurtful is her purpose: Is she using her concern to try to be accurate and to care more for what deserves to be cared for? Or is she using her worry to be grim about everything, to get a hurtful distinction—which is contempt—in feeling the whole world is against her? Learning about this distinction and how to make it, strengthens enormously both a woman’s life and her marriage!

The fee for the class is $10. For more information, call 212.777.4490.