#12 You are wise to be afraid.
Marge Piercy starts her poem To Be Of Use as follows:
The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
That word almost, matters.
Every summer in Croatia, I look forward to daily open-sea long-distance swims. One early morning, I found myself alone and far from the shore. I told my mother-in-law I was a bit shaken by the experience. She was stirring a pot on the stove and, without lifting her head, said “You are wise to be afraid.”
Since then, I have adopted the following rule: At any given time I have to be able to either reach the solid ground below me or swim at a seeing distance from another human being. And, and, and, this year, getting ready for Croatia, I got myself a very visible swim cap.
#13 Fear signals something real.
Remember how while growing up we would love when an adult would tell us a scary story under the dark safe skies or a comforting blanket?
“Tell it again. The scary story, tell it again.”
Why would a child want to be scared?
And why are adults drawn to fear?
It is because we have discovered that fear signals an imminent encounter with something new. We have approached the end of what we know and are about to come in contact with something we don’t. This draws us in. A possibility of another world. Or, even more astonishing, a possibility of another world in this world.
Best of all: Fear signals something real. Not rainbows, unicorns, and lollipops, but something that is hiding from the tiring light of merely wanting to be comfortable or happy.
#14 Fear announces the future.
Fear announces the arrival of something our neural constellation has never met before. Something we may survive or we may not.
Our physical bodies sense it first. Skin tension. A tremble. Fear then takes residence in our emotional body, awaiting our acknowledgment. And finally, after we acknowledge that particular emotion, the conversation that we have been avoiding, with ourselves or another, the one that matters, begins.
Fear announces a change. Our future life is visiting us, sometimes knocking, sometimes crashing through the doors, sometimes seeping under the door as fresh replenishing air. Sometimes waiting for us down the street or in another town, available.
How do you know you are on the edge of what is about to become your new life? There is a measure of fear. It signals not a danger, but the unknown.
This unknown could be dangerous. Crossing that line could take your life, in fact. And that’s why fear’s protection is so valuable. But, this unknown also holds your future.
Why this matters: Everything you are going to become is across that line.
#15 Fear welcomes us.
Change is life itself renewing itself. Life is inviting us to be a part of it and to be a part of it, one must learn to go just beyond the edge of our identity, then practice one’s own becoming where a small step is often better than a large.
Take for example our incredible, miraculous capacity to walk. When you first took the risk of letting go of your parent’s hand and slammed down to the floor there was a choice to be made. Will you do it again?
Or your ability to make a friend. Remember when someone you loved to be with, hurt you, there was a choice to be made. Will you forgive?
Or your ability to be vulnerable. When you allowed your heart to be visible in the world. Perhaps as powerless, confused, or humiliated. Will you stay honest?
This is hard.
Then something unexpected happens: Joy shows up, as unearned and uncalled as fear. Fear and joy, the two sides of one primal emotion.
Oh, that surprising early pleasure of sucking our own fingers! Or the unexpected delight of having been seen and accepted by a family member, friend, or lover. Or the sudden and restorative flood of awe making you silent on your way home after a close encounter with the wild.
If it were not for joy’s visits like these, you would give up a thousand times. You would create a bunker out of your life and fall asleep.
But you are not. You are here. And you are awake. Because of fear.
Change is forcing you, wooing you, or simply waiting for you to arrive at your own next inner threshold. Around the experience of being afraid, each one of us:
renews our intimacy with life
makes a choice on how to risk ourselves in the world now, and
takes our own unique step into the unknown.
To remember: Fear stands at the door and welcomes us into the life we want.
#16 Quote: “Turn and face the strange.”
David Bowie sings about what he calls ch-ch-ch-changes. He “stutters” when he notices the strange. I believe that the unknown inside of us is as vast as the unknown on the outside.
#17 What fear are you sensing in your body now?
What possible and as yet un-lived future is announcing itself to you? What is breaking through, breezing under, or waiting outside of your door? What strangeness?