I had a panic attack Sunday afternoon, it is the first one in some time, my life used to be bounded by them. When Maria and I first got together, we were both living in he most acute panic and anxiety, we felt like two children on a life raft in a typhoon, we just clung to each other. Once in awhile, the trauma, change, turmoil and joy of the past five or six years catches up with me. I get exhausted just thinking about my life, which felt like one of those car wrecks in the big action movies, it just came apart. I will always be putting it back together, perhaps the most creative challenge of my life.
Panic attacks are wicked things, mine can last a few days, they just take my breath away. When I started the blog, I swore to myself that I would write honestly and openly about fear because so many people feel it, especially in our fragmented and phobic culture. I’ve learned a lot about fear, I’ve dealt with it every day of my life, so has Maria. Fear is a killer of things, a smotherer of things. It cripples our thinking and our actions.
People will throw their lives and dreams away rather than risk failure or accept fear. Fear is a great killer of lives and spirits. I believe courage is to never let one’s actions be influenced by my fears, when I am afraid of something I know that it is usually something I need to do.
“I love the man that can smile in trouble,” wrote Thomas Paine, “that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection…” Me, too, that is the man I hope to be, that I sometimes am.
We live in a great system of fear. We are afraid to leave our paychecks, our IRA’s, our mortgages, our pensions and retirement funds, our dreams and our passions, work that we love, peace of mind and freedom. We admire the leap of faith, but cannot always make it. We are told every day that subjugation is responsibility, that fear is the toll we pay for our health care, our ticket to security. I look around me and see everywhere, slaves to fear, people pushed into hollow lives, told every day their dreams are not practical, our world is too complex and expensive.
But they are never told that living in fear is a choice, not a sentence.
I have learned to study fear to death, to think it down to size. I can never run away from fear, I will never completely control or fully suppress it. I can understand it and think about it, learn from it, consider, look in squarely in the eye and said to it, “you are not in charge of me, you are a ghost, mist in the morning, echoes in the brain, just another shirt to wear sometimes.”
When I am afraid, I get up, I read a book, I write something, take a beautiful photo, look at the incontrovertible evidence that life can be beautiful, free and filled with fulfillment. I love a man that can smile at fear.
I also love and admire the responsible man and woman, they are heroes in our time, they are doing the best they can. But fear is not something to ever get comfortable with, to surrender to, to live for. It is not our inevitable state, there are always choices to be made. Fear is a geography, a space to cross. I love the man or woman who can wake up in the middle of the night, shivering in terror, wondering if they will get through the day, cope with the world, dare to find love and meaning, Then they take the fear in their hearts and pull the strength from it, and walk bravely out into the world to live their lives.
May the angels walk with you.