Today I want to speak about fear. My fear that has a specific architecture.
I’m not talking about the panic that comes and goes, or the quick spike of adrenaline before a presentation. I mean the kind of fear that I have built rooms inside of, the kind that has walls I know by touch, ceilings whose stains I have memorized, doors that lock from the inside. The kind that I can sometimes mistake, on a good day, for safety.
This is how I learned that my fear has a structure.
Zig Ziglar said that F-E-A-R has two meanings: Forget Everything and Run, or Face Everything and Rise. Isn’t this acronym tidy? Almost too tidy… but it names something true. Fear is a structure that offers two doors, and those doors are not equal. One leads outward, one leads further in. The fear-house is not symmetrical.
Sadly, I have spent a lot of years walking the inside of that house. I have memorized the wallpaper. I have known the temperature of all the rooms in every seasons. I have, at times, mistaken the inside of the fear for the inside of myself, which is one of the most dangerous confusions I could make.
But like most things in my life, this allegory comes with a paradox.
The structure of fear is real to me, and yet, it is not the structure of who I am.
George Addair said that everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. That sentence sounds like a bad advertisement poster, but well.. the poster is still correct. My wanting and my fear always shared a wall. They were never in different houses. The things I wanted were, in fact, exactly one wall away from all the things that terrified me.
Plato wrote that we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, but that the real tragedy of life is when the adults are afraid of the light. However, it’s the light that reveals the structure and helps us escape the fear-house. The light shows you that the walls are paper, that the ceilings are paper, that the doors are paper. The dark lets you believe that the house is permanent. Fear is the dark that keeps the architecture believable.
What I want to name, today, is that the body and the mind may live in the architecture, but the soul does not. Suzy Kassem said that fear kills more dreams than failure ever will. Well, she is right, but she is also… incomplete. Fear kills dreams that live in the body and in the mind. But I stand firm that it cannot kill the dreams that live in the soul, because the soul is not a room. It is not a structure. It is, as I want to say it today, an endless pool of light. It creates dreams, it emanates hope, and no wall yet built has been able to seal it. Or will ever be able to.
You always have two choices, said Sammy Davis Jr.: your commitment versus your fear. Technically, that choice has to be made daily. But the deeper choice is older. It is the choice to remember which part of you the fear cannot reach.
Fear may paralyze my body and my mind, but it will never paralyze my soul, because my soul is an endless pool of light, creating dreams and emanating hope.
Today, I will walk through one wall of the house. Just one. The paper holds only as long as I believe in the wall.
Enjoy today’s Shatzi.
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**TL;DR**
– Fear has an architecture: walls, ceilings, doors that lock from inside
– The body and the mind live in that architecture; the soul does not
– Quotes from Ziglar, Addair, Plato, Kassem, Sammy Davis Jr. name the choice between “Forget Everything and Run” and “Face Everything and Rise“
– Walking through one wall today is enough; the paper holds only as long as you believe in the wall
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