Fear, what it is and how to move forward from it
23rd November 2021
Don’t hold onto fear, it prevents you from moving forward.
My dad always told me this phrase, and as many things that he told me, at twelve years old, it didn’t quite make sense. It’s funny how life works like that, you don’t seem to have the same existential woes when you’re twelve as when you’re forty-two, so all the stuff he told me only started to become relevant much later in life.
Fear is a thought in your mind. Nothing else. An entity in your brain that you decide is important enough to hold there. You hold it there. Be aware of the fact that it’s you that does that. And the reason you do that, the reason why you deem it important enough, is because fear can argue a damn good case for itself.
It’s so good at its job that it manages to convince you that you need to keep it at the forefront of your mind if you want to avoid a great catastrophe. Otherwise you’ll be doomed, it says. So clever. But is this really true?
I read somewhere that fear and danger are not the same thing and it really stroke a cord, because that’s exactly the game fear plays, it disguises itself as danger. As something imminent that needs to be paid attention to. But the fear that we’re talking about it’s not an imminent danger, it’s an imagined one, a what if.
So next time you feel fear, realise that it’s only a thought and that you’re in control of whether you want to keep it there or not. Ask yourself of whether this is a real danger that you need to act on and if you decide there isn’t just let it go. It’s the single most important thing that you’ll do if you want to move forward in your life.