One gram of fear

One of my favourite theories is that we’re all born with the same quantities of fear and courage, the capacity to stay happy, resilience, tensile strength of emotions, love, patience, sanity…among other things. For the purposes of keeping it simple let’s say that it is one gram of each quality. So then, how does one gram of fear contained among all these other emotions become over-poweringly big in some people.

To explain that I have another theory. The minute you allow fear to creep into a corner of your mind, inadvertently, it takes over and very soon it dictates your decisions and the way you deal with life. It’s like a parasite that feeds into every healthy cell and membrane of your brain leaving behind a trail of blackened, charred cells that are impervious to anything bright and happy. It starts out easy, like fear of dark corners, of the neighbour’s dog, the shadow on the wall, the sound of footsteps following you on a lonely stretch of road, circus clowns, speaking up in front of the boss to say that you don’t agree, changing old habits, defying the neighbourhood bully….the list is endless. And before you know it the invasion has begun and you’re paralyzed and terrified. The scientific explanation talks about the amygdala (an almond shaped organ in the centre of the brain) that sends signals to the nervous system, but how does one define the gradual decline of mind and body that happens when fear has completely taken over all the senses?

It has often been said that the older you get the more irrational your fears are and the more they settle into your psyche. To that I say, doesn’t it make more sense for you to be able to recognize what’s happening? You’re older and wiser. Surely the one gram of patience and sanity have outgrown the one gram of fear and yet, clearly not in many cases. Somehow the corrosive nature of fear beats all the positive emotions, hands down.

Someday when I write my book ‘Conversations with Me’ I will begin each chapter with – There’s no place for fear, here. Because, while I’ve worked hard to keep my one gram of fear at one gram the truth is that it has ballooned to about ten times that size. But then something strange happened. It hit a wall, the one that I referred to as the wall of stubbornness and then it couldn’t grow any more. So yes, it’s there but it’s not growing. Instead it is wrinkling a bit and dying, in small pieces. There are times when I still give in to it but then I have a ‘Conversation with Me’ and tell myself that this was something that was meant to be just one gram. Let it stay just one gram. And that immediately increases my one gram of courage!