Recognize the futility of fearing Life

Face Life. Don’t fear it!

Worry, anxiety, stress, depression, anger, hatred are all different incarnations, avatars, of fear. Your child is not studying well. You worry because you fear that the child’s future is in jeopardy. Your small business is not doing well and you are anxious to bag a new customer because you fear that if you don’t, you will have no money to run the family. You are angry with someone because you fear that their not meeting your requirements or expectations will affect your plans. You hate someone because you fear that your opinions, values, your freedom is violated. So, at the core of all destructive, debilitating emotions is fear. We fear everything: change, the unknown, risk and reality too!

Recognize the futility of fearing Life. Your fear is not going to help your child study better or get a customer to give you a contract or make someone work more efficiently or get anyone to love you, to appreciate you, to respect you. Look every Life situation in the eye. Face it. And deal with it. As children we were all scared of dark rooms. We would hesitate to enter them and require parental help in turning on the lights. So, how is it that we overcame that fear of dark rooms as we grew older? Simple. We learned to face that Fear. Because we learned that every room will have switches that would illuminate them. Learn, similarly, that in every situation in Life, a switch called trust can bring light and remove the darkness.

Here is a short story with a beautiful learning for us. A little girl and her father were crossing a bridge. The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter, “Sweetheart, please hold my hand so that you don't fall into the river.” The little girl said, “No, Dad. You hold my hand.” “What's the difference?” asked the puzzled father. “There's a big difference,” replied the little girl. “If I hold your hand and something happens to me, chances are that I may let your hand go. But if you hold my hand, I know for sure that no matter what happens, you will never let go of my hand.”

The essence of trust, as in the little girl’s story, is not in the bind, but in the bond. To quote Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-American thinker and writer, you__and I__and all of humanity, are a creation of Life’s longing for itself. Believe in, bond with and trust Life to take care of you. This kind of trust can be transformational. And only such implicit trust in Life can extinguish fear and teach us how to face Life and live fully.