Fear

Fear is the little death
It is the mind killer.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

It is not death a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Three different quotes, each expressing a different thought on fear, yet I find them all useful in bringing my own fear under the yoke of my will.

Fear is the mindkiller. It will paralyze my thoughts and actions if allowed. It was fear that kept me from going to doctors, or facing difficult truths, or taking the steps I needed to get through some difficult things.

Whether it is fear of failure or fear of retribution, it's really the fear of pain that prompts us to avoid, and in that avoidance we can stifle ourselves. We stop ourselves from taking the risks we need to in that fear. We halt our own progress.

So I will face that fear, I will allow it to pass through me and when it is done only I will remain. The fear is nothing, it is only my self.

Fear is healthy, it saves us from hurt. It is when the imagining of that hurt goes beyond the reasonable possibility that we must take action.

Fear leads to anger, and leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

It is the personal fears of the other and the unknown which we can then blame for our hurt. We can be angry at them because they are not us. In placing all of the scary possibility on those others,  we begin to believe they wish us harm whether they do or not. We begin to paint all who look like them with the same brush. They are all evil. They deserve to suffer before they do anything to hurt us.

It doesn't matter who the other is, we're very good at finding them. We built entire systems of oppression around this one. Hell, more has been done by this fear than any other.

We fight it by knowing each other. It is only through exposure and time that a people can begin to accept the other as nothing less than themselves. It is through those of us in power positions within our society recognizing that what we fear in that other is not real that we can begin to dismantle those systems.

I must not hate. I must learn.

A man should not fear death so much as fear not having started to live.

This one hits me hard, especially recently. It was the fear of dying before everything was set for the Korray that had me most motivated to do something about my health. That was a mistake.

Now that fear is non existant. I cannot use it to motivate me and already the small, justifying voice begins to sneak in. A small spoon of ice cream. A cookie, a small sip of sugared soda... each one a small step down the slope.

I must fear not starting to live to motivate here. I must look to what I am able to do as the weight continues to drop, and I must look to where that took me and the reasons my journey has had this victory to motivate me to keep going.

I want to run. I want to skate with my daughter,  I want to fight with a rapier at least once more. Those things cannot happen well with my current body.  I must improve myself to live, not to avoid death.

Each of these fears can kill and motivate. How we see those fears can be all we need to find the way to use them. Changing that view is the hard bit.