Having lived through a significant number of decades, I have realized that many decisions that we make are based on some level of fear. In my family, education was viewed as a mitigation for a potential life of menial labor. My father told me repeatedly that his career goal was to create a long career by “showing up and staying out to trouble”. He feared the alternative of needing to find a job that was not attractive and that would not meet our family expenses. When I entered college in 1965, he told me that, with a war escalating in southeast Asia and a draft in place in America, I should join the ROTC program at my college. His logic was that, with some military training, I might be able to be on the end of a mop in the chow hall rather than on my hands and knees with a scrub brush polishing the floors of the chow hall. Fear was induced thoughout my childhood. One night my father heard me, at age 6 or 7, crying in my bed after bedtime. He asked me about the reason for my tears. I told him that I was going to hell. Surprised, he asked “why”. I told him that I had left my baseball glove outside and that it was raining. He quickly calmed my fears by teliing me that the Lord had already forgiven me. Fear, on many levels, was resident in an entire generation of kids across the world.
As time passed, like most people in the baby boomer generation, we moved through the phases of growing into adulthood with fears being a continual background drumbeat. The “Cold War”, the communist party, the growth of television recitations of crimes in our communities, the various travails of life in mid-century America each echoed in our fields of view throughout our adolescence and early adulthood. During these years, it occurred to me that fears came in different ways, with different resultant emotional reactions. Of course there was the occasional presence of existential fear. These fears include the limitation of our mortal existence, the dread of ultimately having a life without meaning, the possibility of encountering potential loneliness.These fears are interspersed with fears that arise when we encounter what we perceive as dangerous situations, such as driving on roads laden with “black ice” or creating a kitchen fire while frying chicken. Fears intrude in our lives in many ways. The task we confront is how do we push our fears to the back of our consciousness?
Since fear exists on many levels, we can take actions and develop internal skills that mitigate fears. We can install smoke alarms and gas monitors in our homes. We can ensure that our tires are sufficiently maintained in order to safely drive on snow covered roads and that slower speeds and training help us navigate ice covered roads. Attaining these tools derive from our awareness of potential threats that enable us to move them to the background of our consciousness and away from our emotional triggers. The stresses caused by our mortality and perception of life after death are handled by education and the discipline of continually developing our intellectual and emotional skills through our spirituality and our ability to define the meaning in our lives for which we find purpose and belonging. We can learn to develop our ability to connect with others. Our internal ability to mentally reduce stress can improve through meditation or by recognizing that stress exists and purposely teaching ourselves to move to a level of peace and tranquilty by practicing switching our mindset. By learning to focus, we learn to move our mental and emotional states to the positive rather than the negative. I learned to do this by literally timing with my watch my ability to switch from negative to positive mental states. At first, it took some hours to find calm. Practice has allowed me to accomplish the management of mental stress in literally minutes or seconds. After almost eight decades, I find that I have less fear response. I have essentially no loneliness even though I live alone, and more satisfaction and happiness on a daily basis. I have studied fears, their causes and how I have emotionally and mentally responded. I choose my emotional and mental states because they are mine to control.
While fears are ever present in life, as we grow and age, we can control their presence in our lives by exploring and understanding our internal relationship with fears. By creating mental transitions that mitigate or eliminate fears, we find ongoing peace and satisfaction with life. At Safe Harbor Pathways, we welcome your thoughts and connection as we move through our purpose driven lives and as we move forward from fears.
bill@safeharborpathways.com
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