So a pretty influential and important dude in history said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." -Franklin D. Roosevelt
He said it for the comfort of the masses and for impact to create trust, of course, but it is my belief that this statement, a quote that has been used repeatedly now for damn near 100 years, helped created a somewhat skewed perception and even what some would consider a misconception about what fear is, how fear happens FOR us and what we should do with fear when it arises. Fear has been created into an incredible wrongness in the minds of humanity and there's a whole slew of reasons why. President Roosevelt is obviously not to blame for the misconceptions. His quote was just the perfect example of that wrongness that fear has been molded into.
If fear did not exist, how would we appreciate or have the ability to understand freedom or courage? Polarities are necessary for our experience on the planet as humans. It's an incredible gift we've been given to experience adversity, overcome that adversity and come out of it embracing the opposite of what we just overcame. Fear is the biggest adversity any of us face on this planet and it shows up in dozens of various forms for each individual on their journey. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of scarcity, fear of other people. And the minute fears and phobias are absolutely endless. We live on a fear based planet where majority of our negative emotions stem directly from fear.
Our denial of the embracing of the idea of fear has created more fear. Here is a bit of a lengthy example. Stick with me! A man has a fear of spiders and lives someplace where he must co-exist with spiders. He goes to bed with fear of a spider climbing in with him, he wakes up afraid to encounter a spider during his morning routine. He leaves home hoping to not see a spider on the way to his car. Anytime he is outside, he can't even enjoy himself, for he fears he might come across a spider out in nature. Every aspect of this man's life is riddled with a minute fear. This fear switches on his fight, flight or freeze response much more often than what would be ideal and as a result other things in his life go awry and a snowball effect begins. He lacks good sleep, so his performance at work declines, then he is in fear of losing his job. If he loses his job, he fears not being able to find a new one and that spirals into fear of losing his home, his vehicle and loss of quality of life. These are massive fears all stemming from a tiny fear of spiders.
What if this man decides that fear is an inevitable part of life and not something to feel wrong about, overcome or conquer? What if he decides that fearing fear is limiting his quality of life and he says to the fear, hey pal, we both exist here and we are both necessary here and we have to figure out how to co-exist here without me ruining my life for fear of you. Maybe he'd be inspired to successfully find ways to repel spiders from his home. People do it all the time. If he no longer worried about cohabitating with spiders, it could open up a completely new way of living for him.
Now that was quite a silly and surface level example and pretty low below, but I feel rather confident that your intellect as one of my readers could find branches off of that story to something deeper and potentially relatable in your own life. The point is that fear is inevitable and it is my belief that it should not be perceived as a wrongness or something that must be squashed, let's say. Maybe someday we'll be in a higher vibrational situation where it can go back to its intended use of alerting us to actual danger in our outer environment as opposed to making us question our very existence in our day to day lives. A girl can dream, right?
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