Steering clear of fear...

Today I got the very rare treat of some unexpected me time. So I ate it up with some reading. I'm still working on The Ties That Bind. It's an interesting book because it makes me think, something I highly value. But, at the same time, I am not affected by the words. They don't excite me, the way I sat in my driveway this evening for 10 minutes because I just couldn't get myself to turn off The Hour I First Believed. I finally had to force my hand to the power switch so I would go in and let my dog out. But as I spent my surprise 15 minutes reading, I was caught up in one line:

The thing we fear most will always happen. That's because we spend so much of our energy fearing it.

Those words, fear and energy, caught me up in a spiral of thought. What is the thing that I fear most right now other the the usual death and destruction? Not being a real writer. This fear consumes me at almost all moments of all days. In fact, it does so to such an extent that I probably have associated the idea of writing more with negativity than positivity. How backward is that. It is true, therefore, for me at least, that the thing I fear most has become true for the simple fact that I have been feeding it with my fear.

To relate this to the situation described in The Hour I First Believed, the boys responsible for the Columbine tragedy were full of fear- fear of not belonging, fear of not having a future, fear of being different, fear of disappointing their parents, themselves. They were living so deeply in these fears that they allowed themselves to become completely consumed by them, getting pulled down into a completely imagined world of pain and anger- a world that soon became reality for many. It is so easy to just discard these kids as crazy; it is much harder to look at the power that fear holds over us all.

Thinking about this on a more global scale, it becomes true in all realms. People who fear, no matter what the situation it is directed toward, feed their energy into a giant coop of negativity. The resulting mass of negativity spreads through conversations with friends, blogs, email forwards, attitudes, driving choices, and soon it has affected the energy of numerous others. Luckily, positivity spreads just as easily and quickly, though it may be less easily detected. It's just like the Chaos Theory I examined last week. The butterfly flaps her wings in Brazil, a tornado happens in Texas. One person lets fear pull them under- negativity and darkness can cross oceans- and people worldwide suffer pain. I think we do a serious disservice to ourselves and each other by giving into fear.

True fear serves its purpose. It can protect us from harm. But imagined fear only serves to hurt us. The trick is telling the two apart. Can I get hurt from crossing a busy intersection? Quite possibly. Can I get hurt from writing horribly and having other people see it? Not likely.


Ok, so this isn't one of my most photographic photographs. But I couldn't think of a better depiction of fear. Setting one half of one foot onto a glass box 1,353 feet in the air over the streets of one of the busiest cities in the country for one half of one second is as close as I ever hope to get to real fear. (Especially when the box next to it has yellow tape in front of it because it has a giant crack in it!)