Fear is a fast shadow
By Dr. Wendy Morua
As a psychologist, when I hear you, it reminds me of my own anxiety. I do get it, at least some part of it. I can often see how anxiety takes a hold. Startling, intruding, unnoticeable at first. Coming in through the senses, soon flooding the mind and the body, overwhelming and taking over. With a world, full of earthly and spiritual threats and unknown random errors, anyone with a beating heart, is susceptible, vulnerable, defenseless.
I have lived it, that moment of malfunction, when you need your mind the most and death is a pending one-wrong-move away. In an entire life, this is precisely when you need your fingers to dial the three little numbers announced in every crisis post. “Call 911!,” he desperately yells. But you can’t figure out where the digits are. In that incredibly slow moment, thoughts feel funneled. Action matters, focus matters, but neither show. It’s impotency. Your mind and body are traitors, the pressure is enormous, and it’s infuriating.
You might soon figure out that it’s all about adjustment. An automatic inhale, gives you just enough of a rev. Neurological pathways reroute, reaching the frontal lobe and your will connects your thoughts with your body, unfreezing it. In a thankful instant, not wasting another second, you’re finally acting, your racing. Climbing up and down the stairs, moving out of the way, getting in the way, pacing, as faceless humans carry away the one you love the most. The sirens feel internal and if you can talk, only trembling words come out. You’re weaving in and out of reality, all while feeling lost and helpless.
No other moment is more dreadful than to watch that amount of pain, an inch away from devastation and grief. But you look anyway because the answer to what you want to know is on your loved one’s face. Are they going to make it? Please God, please let them make it. Feeling their pain as they grimace intensely, wanting any amount of control, the fear seems ridiculous, unreasonable.
I get why someone with intrusive thoughts, paralyzing fear, avoids.
But how else, will we know? Facing a fear, enduring unbearable discomfort; it’s asking to catch the shadow and notice that ugly grin. It’s unburying existential questions under layers of protection. When deconstructed, the fear deduces to the finality and the inevitability of the separation that death brings. It’s about disconnection; losing ourselves or having death gobble up the ones that we love.
Behold, God the creator of the universe, is everywhere. If we let fear shelter us in a cold dark cave, how will we ever experience light and warmth? Please, take just one step past the confusion, go ahead and explore. You will see, that light and dark exist together outside but also inside of you. It’s an endless interaction between two forces. If death is near, then you may soon live eternally. If you keep moving forward, you’ll delve deeper into yourself, feeling differently, restructuring your beliefs.
Generating courage is discrediting the power of doubt. Go ahead and believe that you can; initiate a cycle of positivity headed towards inspiration and encouragement. Insightfully, once we realize the limitations of our own control, it’s easier to float peacefully, letting the wind carry us to inevitable connection. And the demon inside withers to insignificance, as the light shines to warm us.
So next time, when the dark shadow speeds past, mysteriously calling for your attention, search for the pursuit of it’s battling angel in an eternal chase. If you are enduring pain and discomfort, notice something beyond your point of focus. There are always multiple perspectives; maximum and minimum perspectives of good versus bad. Notice that even at the atomic level, oxygen breaks down chemically toxic bonds. And that at the cosmological level, galactic winds clean the atmosphere of smog and gasses. The poison and the detoxifying antidote is all there in front of you, around you, and inside of you.
You just need to connect, refocus, try again. Go ahead and expose yourself, endure, hold on, be brave, make the move, take the chance, say the word, believe.
