Today's
Meditation:
Many books
have been written about fear and its effects on us.
Many people have studied just how we respond to fear, and
just how much our fears limit us from living life as fully
as we were meant to. Fear is one of the major topics
of many self-help books, for much of our behavior and our
perspective is based on what we fear, how much we fear it,
and how we respond to that fear. Fear could be
called the great saboteur, for it affects our lives and
our potential in many negative ways, often keeping us from
being or doing all that we were meant to be or to do.
Fear
tends to make us pull back from things, or to avoid facing
them in the first place. Fear makes us think that
risk is always harmful, that doing the unknown can only
turn out badly.
Most
of our fears, though, tend to be the products of our
imagination. When we start imagining all the bad
things that can happen, of course we're going to fear
taking a certain action or facing a certain risk. No
one wants to have awful things happen to them, and many
people actually use their fears as a helpful excuse not to
do certain things, even if those things might have
incredibly positive results in their lives.
Fear
is often simply a question of attitude, and a question of
not seeing things quite clearly. In all my life, I
have almost never seen my worst fears come to pass, and
even when they have, the outcome hasn't been nearly as bad
as I imagined it would be, in any circumstance. My
life has gone on, and I've been able to deal with what
life has given me as well as what I've taken from
life. Some types of fear are helpful, like the kind
of fear that keeps me from walking out onto a ledge of a
very high building, but most of my fears are unfounded,
except in the recesses of my own imagination.
|