7 & 7: Explore vs. Fear

REFLECTION:

Without justification, without reason, without form and boundaries, fear paralyzes individuals, communities and societies. Fear may be conquered if addressed. Picturing it, placing it on the table where it can be observed and analyzed helps. Fear can be reasoned with. Fear is often tangled up in our private affairs, tangled in strategies of avoidance, repressed but never out of sight. Running away does not help. Fear drives you in the wrong direction and is there to greet you when you arrive. Conquering fear requires that you embrace change, discarding the old, adapting to the new. In return comes comfort in playing many parts and exploring many roles. As we stretch to transform, we are brand new and fear loses its grip. Comfort develops with the experiment, and the experiment is you. It is happiness, but happiness of a different kind each time. Security is surrendered voluntarily and the hold your enemy had on you, the knowledge of what frightened you, is no longer useful to him, because it frightens you no more. You are out the door, exploring another room, one that shows no respect for fear. If you fail, so what? Most worries are short-lived. You are on the move, discovering new lands, leaving behind shores that never protected you anyway. Is it a crisis, the danger? Or an opportunity?

MUSES:

So let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.
Alfred Hitchcock

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

All men should strive to learn before they die
What they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
William O. Douglas

All the world’s a stage.
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’

Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original shape.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Do not be too timid and squeamish… All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
Charles L. Morgan

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
Gail Sheehy

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened.
Helen Keller

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Albert Camus

Those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy

If a man can remember what he worried about last week, he has a very good memory.
Anon.

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Andre Gide

In Chinese, the word for crisis is wei ji, which means danger, and ji, which means opportunity.
Jan Wong