January 4, 2008 – Of all the many e-mail messages I get, the most satisfying are from people who write that they are encouraged by the blog to deal with fear and move beyond it. I’m not honestly sure why this is so, but am glad it is for some people. I think, from my curious perspective on the farm, far removed from the experts and wizards who are constantly explaining our lives to us on TV, that this has been an extraordinary season of fear.
  I am told by some people that I am fearless, yet I experience quite a bit of fear, so I can’t quite imagine how this could be so. This has been a season of fear. Those of us who are prone to anxiety, worry or just plain terror about life have struggled in an environment where panic became an epidemic hysteria, an environment that almost redefined the idea of living with fear. It was not possible to escape it, from the lugheads yelling on cable talk shows to “friends” calling up with bad news to search engine news pages giving us minute-by-minute updates on our collapsing world.
  To be fearful is not (necessarily) to be dumb. I find that people who know fear are, of necessity, alert, vigilant and intuitive. They are not buying the idea that we are going over the cliff. They are seeing beyond the panic to a challenging, perhaps saner and more meaningful world. The smart people I know are much more  afraid of things staying the same than changing.
  We are  moving out of the season of fear, further enhanced around here by one gloomy, cold, stormy or icy day after another.
  Speaking for myself, I am moving out of this season, and into another. I’m not into being chipper, but I am not particularly fearful these days. I’m getting focused, energized, feisty and obnoxious. How did this happen?
 – I got help. People think it’s normal to be afraid, and are often reluctant to let go of it. I highly recommend getting help and letting go of it.
 – I began to think differently. I remembered the things I was doing well, I thought of the things I wanted to do, I grasped the difference between feelings and reality, often two very different things.
  – I let good people help me, and I listened to them when they told me I would be all right. Friends are good. Make them and listen to them.
 -Thomas Merton is right. You cannot live a life without faith. Religious faith is one kind, but not the only kind. Believing that you can and will survive is pehaps the most powerful faith. I recommend it.
  It helps to know that other people get afraid sometimes, even people who seem like successful big shots. I am actually astonished to learn how common fear is, especially in our complex and stressful culture.
  Some of the fearful people are wising up. They are turning off the television, and thinking about the things that might  make their life worthwhile.
 Markets and money are not the only things in life. Change can be meaningful as well as disturbing. It presents us with options, shakes us out of complacency, reminds us that security is not the the same as happiness, and is internal, and not external.
  I reminder what I told myself when I fell into that dark hole last year. Fear is a space to cross, a matter of emotional geography. Problems and disappointments are real. Fear, quite often, is a ghost. You can put your hand right through it, and blow it away.