No emotion has overtaken my spirit in the last 7 days with the same force as fear. Fear...such a ubiquitous, stealthy, hidden emotion! Even in it's disguise, it can color every thought and action. We all have fears, and yet we so rarely are willing to share our fears with the world. Few hesitate to announce with passionate intensity "I love you!"... "I hate you!"... "I need you!"... "I admire you!"...but the picture seems almost inhuman to see a person announce with the same intensity "I fear you!"...almost as if the pure acknowledgment of fear is acceptance of weakness and inequality, but it should not be so. Fear is a real emotion, and deserves as much attention and respect as love, anger, sadness, and elation.
It's an impossible feat to create a picture that can describe fear - the emotion is so malleable, it fits in every pocket of emotional void. It can grow from the smallest speck of minimalism to an intensive explosion of a supernova with a fleeting thought brushing through the mind in a split second. It can remain small, seemingly benign, for years only to invisibly grow and control the mind, heart, arms and legs without one even knowing their own self-control is gone. Fear can be like a chameleon, changing it's color to match the surroundings and seemingly invisible. It's so easy to let our attention brush over fear and move on, to fail to acknowledge it's existence...and, yet, it may control so much of our decisions, of our life.
I felt fear grip me with it's icy claws on several occasions this week, and I think it is only my steadily increasing self-awareness that has led me to see that fear is in almost my every thought. Fear pumps my blood from only the imagination of a dreaded outcome...even outcomes that are within my control - fearing the worst can make me run away from any outcome at all, just in case the outcome is the one I'm afraid of.
I'm still learning what I fear most, and how to challenge, attack, and conquer it. I'm still surprised when I notice it - and just now feel it's weight on my life. But here, with these keys and this computer - I've found a place where I can feel free without fear - there is no anger in a computer screen, no irritation, no tension. I can let my feelings run free like gazelle in the African plains and no tiger is hiding to attack them and drag them under water as invalid, trivial, unimportant, dead. This place in my mind where I go, and this feeling I'm looking for when I'm writing here - this place is one of the places where I lose fear.
No comments:
Post a Comment