THERE are many things that we gradually grow to fear. Some of these fears take intangible forms, like the shadows that lurk in the corners of the rooms we occupy. Others are larger and more solid. They take up a distinct space in our hearts, creating a weight that, no matter how much we try to ignore it, will not go away. Even in moments when the fear is lifted away, we notice the outline it has left. We feel the depression in the space it has created, like a footprint planted by an enormous monster. As long as we are human, we cannot live a life completely free of fear, and in truth, we sometimes need fear to ensure that we remain human.
Fear can be ugly, but it can also be powerful. The fear of failure drives us to practise, study and work. The fear of loss helps us to be grateful. The fear of consequences helps us to make the right choices. Yet, as the average man progresses through life, he uses fear, or the lack thereof, as a measure of how much he has grown. We often mistake a lack of fear for power. We believe that one who has nothing to fear must be extremely strong. In reality, it is not power that prevents a man from being fearful. Instead, it is the inability to lose anything else from his possession. It is complete emptiness, a state of having nothing more to lose, that makes an individual truly fearless.
If we allow ourselves to pause and truly reach deep into our hearts to discover what exactly we fear, we can also find the things that make our lives worth living. We can find the things that give us the strength and motivation to keep moving, even in the face of our deepest fears.
The world is not a blank canvas. We cannot paint it into the kind of picture that appears in our dreams. However, we can choose to take the elements that we see and write the stories by which we wish to be remembered. Fear is often seen as an obstacle that we need to overcome to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. As one may easily discover, fear does not always have to be an obstacle. It can be a reminder to push ourselves further because we have so much to lose if we do not.
If we choose to wait for our fears to dissolve before we set out to achieve our goals, then we will simply never move from the position in which we are standing! Instead of focusing our energy on overcoming our fear, we should be using it to transform our fear into our fuel. We should be learning to make enormous decisions, step outside of our comfort zones and work towards our most distant dreams, all while being terrified. We should be able to do the most important things in our lives, even as fear rages like a storm at the bottom of our hearts.
We are all living our lives for the very first time. Although it may seem like it sometimes, no one truly has all the answers to the questions that life poses, waiting at their fingertips for them to use. Most of these answers are discovered in a stumbling haze, in the same way that a baby may learn to walk or a toddler may learn to speak. Even then, the answers that seem extraordinarily clear in one moment can stir your beliefs into a state of turbidity when you reach the cusp of another one of life’s moments.
It is okay to be terrified. It is perfectly fine to be confused. What we can never allow ourselves to become is paralysed. As we write our stories, let us build legacies of brilliance and passion. Let us leave reminders of what human excellence can mean. Then, as we grow to remember the stories we lived, let us give a bit of space to the fear that gave us the courage to be who we are meant to be.
