Most people who know me will not call me fearful but only because they don’t know the real me. When I was 6 years old my beloved father went to work one day and never came back because he died of a heart attack. The loss of my father and protector who was full of joy and life, affected me deeply. I felt abandoned and fearful in the days to come. As I grew I learned to hide my fears well. As I encountered scary experiences as a child and preteen, I began to shut down my feelings of fear by creating an outer shell that hid my fears well. As the years have passed by I have learned a thing or two about courage. I have to daily choose to be fearless.
Most of us want to be courageous. To be courageous is to be wholehearted. It is not the absence of fear but rather faith/Belief in something or someone bigger than the threat. There are two kinds of fears in our world. Real threats and imagined threats. Most of us have a lot of imagined threats that trigger adrenalin. We then get into our flight and fear response generating stress hormones. Real threats are those that seriously threaten your life or well being and we do well to pay attention to them. We do well to teach our children to respond to those threats whether from a bully or a bear! Adrenalin can be a help if it is a real bear but not if it is an imagined bear!
All of us have many imagined threats and fears that paralyze us, limit us and suppress us from living a courageous life. One of the fears that sabotaged my life was “what will people think?”. Sometimes in the past I moved to a place of bravado where I said “who cares what other people think!” but continued internally to seek the approval of others and made many unwise choices that hurt me and I have to live with the consequences of my choices. It is quite impossible to make all the people around you happy. Have you ever tried making everyone happy! It can make you very unhappy! Happiness is a choice to be who you are and choose how you will be! Choose well!
I have now learned to be courageous by asking ” How will I think?” and care about WHO or WHAT feeds and directs my thinking. That makes a difference. In a day and age where we rush about incessantly it is vital to ask ourselves “How shall we think?” Although you are not your thoughts, it is vital to know that when our minds are renewed with wholesome, positive and energizing thoughts we can choose courage over fear. Choose strength and courage today! All around you are the resources to live a courageous life.
Carpe Diem. Seize the day!
Her story was not strange, abandoned as a baby, foster homes, you know the routine. She saw the compassion in my eyes as she told the story and said : “Jonathan, please don’t feel sorry for me, we cannot choose who loves us, but we can choose to love” She had chosen to love. I asked her what she was grateful for and she giggled, as her eyes grew big and she said: “Today I am so grateful that I can have a nice long hot shower in my apartment, volunteer at a food kitchen, and have an apartment close to the bus stop and the library” Simple things, often taken for granted in our lives. She didn’t own a car, she cleaned other people’s houses for a living, and probably did not have an overflowing retirement fund.