“I will always have fears, but I not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.”   — Parker J. Palmer

I like this thought very much and wanted to share it. It came out of my daily quiet and reading time. I think it keeps me sane (it’s a relative term with me) and grounded.

For many years, I was my fears, and they shaped almost everything I did or didn’t do. I did a lot of harm to me and to others.

I haven’t had a panic attack in years now, and I don’t miss them.

I’ve learned to use the other places within me to speak and act and make decisions.

The biggest thing I learned about my fear was that I spent much of my life being afraid of the wrong things.

The things I was most afraid of never happened, and the things that were the most fearful to me were never things I imagined happening.

I remember feeling very short of breath one morning five years, and I went to urgent care and said, I thought I had asthma again.

The doctor gave me an inhaler and sent me home. The next day it was worse, and I went to see my nurse practitioner, she called me all sorts of names, and I ended up heading to the hospital in an ambulance having open-heart surgery.

Because it was such a surprise, I didn’t have time to get frightened and Maria and I spent a couple of enjoyable days in a hospital waiting for my surgery.

I amazed myself, I never felt any fear, even as I was being wheeled into the operating room. I thought of all the small things I had feared in my life.

At the time, I was terrified about never having love or sex again in my life, and I fought both when I stopped worrying about them.

I was terrified of starting my blog, and it turned out to be one of the best and most rewarding things I ever did. I couldn’t imagine Maria loving me, and she did.

I think no feeling takes over our lives or cripples us more than fear. And when you think about it, it is all air and emotion.

A friend of mine is terrified about starting up her blog because she might misspell a word and look stupid in front of her parents and child.

I think of her often, giving up her life as a writer to avoid typos seems a bad deal to me.

I have typos in my writing all the time; I get snarky comments about it regularly. I love my typos; I am so glad I write out of joy and not fear.

I guess I am not destined to get along with English teachers, I never did when I was a kid, I don’t know. I always fell for librarians, they seemed to get me.

A friend wrote to me today to she was terrified of what might happen in the presidential election. She asked what I thought. I said I had no idea what will happen in the future, the future to many seems to me to be a giant receptacle of fear.

I have enough to think about today, you will rarely if ever, find me fretting about the future, not anymore.

I think most fear comes from re-living the past and trying to scope out the future.

I see no point or value in it.

The future never turns out to be the way people think it will be, and the past was never as sweet as people think it was. Let it go, I remind myself, it will happen and I will deal with it then.

I like the present, it’s my peaceful and happy zone.

Fear nested inside of me for much of my life and came up in a blink or breath; it’s like a virus that spreads quickly throughout the body and my mind.

More than anything, I decided that fear blinds, and that it was just a space to cross.

I just walk right through it and have survived every time. I turn around and stick my tongue out at it.

I like the idea of stepping out of my fear and into what one writer called “the inch of the unknown.”

Fear took away my confidence in ever having the life I wanted to live. Every time I step through it and into my life, I get stronger and closer to the life I wish to live.