Thank You for Fear

Fear can scream at you, it can paralyze you, it can take possession of you, or it can whisper to you with an intuitive little nudge that is designed to make you walk away from a situation at an expedient pace.

This was useful to humans when we could allegedly be devoured by dinosaurs.

I have been in a few precarious situations in my life wherein fear has kept me from harm. I have been in some situations where I did not adhere to the intuitive nudges of fear and found myself having to repair damage to my psyche. I have also been in situations where fear had no business in keeping me safe, it just lingered around like a nuisance, telling me to run when there was nothing to run from—fear gone bad, out of context, stuck on replay from some other time when I was supposed to run from dinosaurs and did not listen.

Sometimes this “out of context” fear sneaks up on me in layers, like an onion with an invisible core. It requests that I examine the source of it’s appearance and unfolding. It whispers “Remember when this happened?” or “Don’t trust that because…”. This “stuck on replay” fear says “You will fail.” or “This person will hurt you if you love them.”

This kind of fear can keep me looking backwards at dead dinosaurs and prevent me from exploring a safe jungle of orchids and bird songs.

Fear in itself is not a bad thing—like I said, it has it’s place and it can keep us alive.

I am thankful for that aspect of fear.

But fear that is self generated from associations, distorted memories, or lack of information can harm us more than that from which fear was designed to protect us.

Fear that is generated by authorities or others who wish to control us on some level is the worst kind of fear. This can destroy whole cultures with invisible dinosaurs.

It is insidious and we must walk away from IT at an expedient pace.

Thank you for the ability to recognize fear.

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~ by leakelley on April 25, 2014.