What do you fear most?
Death? Failure? Ghosts? People? Pizzas? Roaches?
Most of us have some or all of the above fears rolled up on each other. We seldom realize the essence of all this though.
What is the purpose of this innate emotion? Everyone has some part of it governing their daily lives. A businessman fears a market collapse, a farmer fears famine, the army fears insider ambush, your mum fears you (or you fear her / your dad fears her).
We recognize the facts around fear being both positive and negative. During this stance we no longer have a problem seeing audacity and fear as one and the same. The problem therefore, lies in our thinking. As so many of us think, fear does not intend to stop us from doing what we should do. Fear also prompts us to act, which is where we could place courage. We often mistake courage to be the opposite of fear. Courage actually is positive fear (the opposite of negative fear). We tend to place courage as fearlessness because we don’t quite have that model of positive fear in our braincells. Hence, till the time we learn to think on the lines of positive fear, we cannot really begin to understand that we can positively enjoy being afraid. Make sense??
On the flip side, Yea enough!! we all know fear don’t we. Some shy away from admitting it, some quite fearlessly proclaim it. What do you think fear is all about?
Fear as it stands, holds two parallels. a) Real Fear, and b) Assumed Fear
The Real variety deals with knowing the consequence(s). You know you lie at the end of that cliff, hanging to your next breath essentially which is held around the tree root that you are dangling on to. The sure option that precides here is a fall = death (unless you’re Krrish or Poopman) OR rescue (self or otherwise). This is a Real Fear.
The Assumed stance comes about when we base our thoughts on probability. And that, with the proclaimed knowledge of being hopeless at Mathematics / Statistics, isn’t really a good idea.
You are standing in front of an audience of over a 100 people. You are to address a presentation/seminar. That funny feeling hits you. Anxiety coupled with darting and differed doses of simulated fear. The cause is unknown.
What do you think these two fear forms pronounce? Well, for starters it doesn’t do much. But looking deeper, we could actually reflect upon ourselves and have defined, the stems for our own living. We take fear as a single form of discomfort and do not think from the other side. Yes quite right, the positive side. Fear is a beautiful exponent of how much we can do. But that hardly comes through to our heads, does it?
There is so much to learn and do on the other side. If we don’t get ourselves to believe in the other aspect of fear, there’s no way to understand it. If we don’t understand fear, there’s no way we can understand our lives (which we seldom realize). Ask yourself the question Is Fear what life is all about?
Think about it…