“Early and
provident fear is the mother of safety.”
Edmund Burke
It is true, there is no other passion able
of efficiently robbing the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning, as
fear does. It is also true that the person who does not overcome fear on a
daily basis has not really learned the lesson of life. These two sentences
express two sides of fear. There can either be rational justified fear, or the
debilitating unreasoned and unjustified form of fear.
Alfred Hitchcock said that there is no
terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of its sound. Think about the truth
of this statement – it is not darkness you fear, but what it hides… In a
previous blog post, I referred to Han Yu who said that the seven constituents
of someone’s emotional make-up, are joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred, and
desire. A man of superior emotional make-up will display these emotions in a
balanced manner. Fear is one of these, but the secret is – balance. So you see,
fear is a natural constituent of your human make-up. It is therefore not wrong
to be afraid, go on, be afraid, listen to that voice that warns you but never give
in to fear. What we need to do, is to learn how to confront the objects of our
fear. People tell lies out of fear of what people might think of them if they
were ever to tell the truth. Fear like this should not be entertained, this
type of fear is incapacitating and it will result in your living an incomplete
life, so face your fears and liberate yourself in the process. It is as Mark
Twain says, courage is the resistance to fear, the mastery of fear, not the absence
of fear.
Fear is an
integral part of our make-up,
it’s there and we have to face it;
it won’t disappear by taking a lamp and giving it a rub…
it’s there and we have to face it;
it won’t disappear by taking a lamp and giving it a rub…
No, the object of
your fear is something only YOU can beat.
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