Fear really has like a million roles but the one role it seems to have in my life is to wake me up from the sleepwalking I do through my life. I have this tendency to get life on some sort of autopilot. Or at least attempt to. Like it is some great goal of mine to get everything in my life running without my involvement. Like I want everything automated. But like everything else in my life, I find out that as soon as I get everything just the way I want it, I feel the absence of my own presence in all that I just endeavored to do...it is like I have been trying to escape my life while living it.
And as one might guess, it doesn’t work very well...
And this is where fear comes into play. Fear is the thing that will always grab my attention. It can be FOMO, it can be actual fear of dying, it can be fear of making a mistake, it can be any kind of fear about any kind of thing, but fear in some strange way grounds me.
Fear is and has always been something to get me to re-engage when I have wholly left the building of my life. When I have been successful in getting everything just the way I want it, or so I think, fear is the thing that gets me to pay closer attention to my life and to what is going on and to see that, perhaps, having everything on autopilot is NOT the way I actually want it.
I like order. And I also have a tendency to love chaos. I think I love the chaos because it provides me a great deal of opportunities to clean shit up and lock it down. And that is what I seem to want to do with my life. Clean, organize and then step back and admire my own work. However, I will say that is literally as far as that process ever gets. Once I step back and admire my own self created view, then I am off on a tear to clean up something else and then organize it into submission. Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Forever.
But lately I have seen that fear is what pulls me out of this endless cycle I seem to love of cleaning shit up and then wrestling it into some sort of organized submission. Then I want to leave it all behind and move on to the next conquest. But fear...fear of missing out, fear of loss, fear of losing, fear straight up is what always causes me to re-engage. To move beyond the habitual cycles of my own being. To do the other work that is harder which is to stop cleaning and organizing everything into some sort of ridiculous approximation of life, and instead realize that I am missing out because of the way I manage life.
Fear is the thing that ultimately keeps me alive. It is the guard rail if you will to my compulsions. It is the thing, sometimes the only thing that keeps me and them in check at all.
Once upon a time, I thought I was afraid of nothing. Then I got honest and realized I was afraid of everything and everyone. Today, fear and I have a much more intimate connection. Fear shows up to show me where I need work, where perhaps I need surrender, where I am stuck, or perhaps even where I am most intimately challenged and bereft of ideas as how to proceed.
As with everything in this life, all the great paradoxes come to show me that there is always going to be light and darkness. There will always be happiness and sadness. There will always be hope and there will always be fear. And no matter how hard I try, I shall never ever be rid of the need for both. I need the hope and I need the fear. I need all the stuff, both and, never really either or.
And today, perhaps only for today, I can see the delicate balancing point in this and find myself immensely grateful for all.
The pleasure and the pain.
The love and the loss.
The joy and the sadness.
The hope and the fear.
Again.
Still.
