Scared Loose

We’re all scared. We’re scared out of our minds half the time. How do we even sleep, when the only certainty in life is death?

I don’t mind admitting to you that life itself scares me. It terrifies me with its uncertainties and its unknowableness. Life is wilful and it has a will to change. It’s a flowing river that no one can stay still in for long. Even the hardest rock gets worn away by the seemingly soft and inconsequential waters of the river.

No one teaches you this though. No one admits the terror associated with living. I suppose we worry that it would be a grim old world if we told the truth about this existence of ours. Bad enough that we tell fairy tales that thinly veil the darkness that is ever present. We like to say that the darkness stalks us, but that’s a gentle lie. The darkness is inescapable. We are the darkness, and we bring it with us wherever we go.

In the end, if you tire enough of the lies and endlessly circling in a state of denial, you might hear life whisper one of its secrets. That happened to me and the secret I heard life breath upon the wind was; I’m here to teach you.

You see, there was pain in my unremarkable life. I thought I was special in that pain and that my life was uniquely unfair. 

I thought the source of my pain was my parents, and in that I was perhaps not completely incorrect. My father did not protect me and when I prevailed upon my mother to at least intercede, it was clear where her loyalties lay. And so I endured an existence that I did not see as childhood. But it was. I doubt anyone has ever had an idyllic childhood, and if they have, then they’ve likely had precious little to learn from, in which case they were not prepared for the frontal assault that life had in store for them as they entered the faux state of adulthood.

I escaped the bubble of my childhood and ran head first into the world. My head was down, and as a result, I didn’t have a clue where I was going. Thing was, when I looked across at my fellow runners, they seemed to be doing the same thing. I think that is what our twenties are. We’ve been told life is a race and so when the starting pistol fires, we do what we were trained to do. We work in the mistaken belief that work alone will get us to where we need to be.

We work and we believe that our lives are working as a result. We follow the disciplines of the nine to five, and with the money we are given, we arrange our lives via increasing levels of debt. Not just money of course. We invest ourselves in our work, and then in a family, and we keep going.

We keep going because if we ever stopped, then we might actually have to look around us to see where it was we were and if we were really, really brave, we’d look up and see where it was that we were headed.

I did this.

In the end I had to.

Before I had the courage to look at where it was I was heading, I’d mistakenly assumed it was nowhere. That I was in a rut that went around in the same, soul-destroying circle. If only it was as twee as all that.

I didn’t even get that I was too afraid to stop, and that I was even more afraid to look up. That I’d built a wall of fear and beyond that was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And those truths also contained the truth of my current existence.

You can’t stop for long though, because life is movement. And yes, it is struggle. Life is a bloody hard slog and it hurts. We’re supposed to do something about the pain though. You don’t ignore a physical wound that has been inflicted by a poisoned blade, but more often than not, you’ll ignore the self-same wound if it’s a mental one. 

Why?

Because you are scared.

We’re all scared.

If we admitted that a little more, and also admitted to not being the finished article, then maybe we’d have more time and inclination to actually live. Together. Pulling together in a worthwhile direction. 

And I reckon that the direction we’re supposed to be going in is in the same direction as the river of life. I’m not there with that one yet, but that makes a lot of sense to me. It makes sense because I’ve been fighting my entire life, and only just woke up to what I’ve actually been fighting. 

I’ve been fighting the reality of my existence.

I’ve been fighting myself.

We all of us do it. Fear prevents us from seeing things as they really are. Fear locks us in a trap of ignorance. That’s why they say that we have to face fear. We have to look the world in the eye and acknowledge its existence. That way, we stand a chance of accepting it.

And if we accept the reality of our existence, then we accept ourselves and that acceptance frees us, and it elevates us and it gives us the chance to really live and to live well.

I spent my life blaming my parents for the bad start I had in life. The blame game only has dark prizes. I was a fool. I took my pain and I invested in it instead of living. When I actually stopped for a moment and faced my fear and saw beyond it, what I saw was my own shame and guilt.

Why?

Because I knew I was being selfish and I knew I was a fool. The shame of that locked me into a poor state. Worse still, I never did anything about it.

Now I am.

My parents weren’t perfect, but they were far better than I acknowledged. They’re better than that. 

I am better than that. 

Once, I got caught up in what I deserved. What about the people around me? Don’t they deserve me to be better than I was? Isn’t that a big part of what life is? You start the new day and you go again. Your benchmark? Your competition? It’s you and only you. Learn. Grow. Improve. Be better.

Be the change.

Be brave and dare to be the change you want to see in the world.

I’m still scared. Maybe more so now than when I was in my perpetual state of ignorance and denial. But that initial fear is necessary, it makes you pause for thought, to consider what will happen next, what your actions will be, and then the adrenaline kicks in and you take that leap of faith and you make sure whatever you do is worthwhile and that it sticks.

However bad I thought things were, that was on me and my fear. I did not see clearly because I gave into my fear. Now I see through it. Things are neither bad or good. They just are. In my ignorance, I soaked myself in self-doubt and I defeated myself at every turn. 

I’m better than that.

I can do better than that.

I will do better than that.

So yeah, I may still feel that fear. But now I’m trying to do something about it…