Aah Halloween, shorter days, longer darker shadows and colder nights. Ooh, a fun and sometimes scary time of year depending on you age. If everything is bigger than you, and someone isn’t holding your hand or picking you up when things go bump in the night, your experience of getting through the night can be a challenge.
As we grow older, how we deal with our fears dictates how we move forward in life.
We all fear things. In some cases, our fears in rare life threatening situations is a fight or flight trigger of our ancestral human survival instincts.
We can all justify our other fears, but it is how we deal with them that can determine our quality of life.
My amazing wife Marsha tells students that if they resist their fears, those fears are certain to persist.
Becoming aware of our fears is key to seeing how we let them immobilize us. Calming our minds when we think of things that manifest fearful thoughts is the first step in recognizing these fears. Quiet awarenes allows us to step aside and watch our fears drift about in search of a place to raise havoc.
More often than not, our fears are of our own creation, sometimes based on an old experience we hold onto. Other times, we allow ourselves to buy into fears hyped by manipulative individuals looking to get us to act against our own best interests in order to keep us under their control. How many of these false prophets come to mind? Look to see who they are by how many times they have been wrong or show no real evidence of fact to prove their mongering.
If you allow your fears to overwhelm you, you are giving your power and well being over to someone or something else! Why would you do that?
At that most dangerous time during World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood tall before a confronted nation to famously say, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
His wife, Humanitarian, Diplomat and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Both were powerful and inspiring people, and their statements empowered a nation to raise above a most uncertain time and in the end, overcome.
So, calm down, become aware, face the fear, relax and learn let it go. It is an ongoing but worthwhile process that allows one to grow and learn about oneself.
Look for the beauty in life, and learn to trust yourself. Take a chance and move forward everyday.
Life is waiting
