I’m kind of starting off with the big chunks, because without these being understood, a lot of other things I try to explain will probably make even less sense.
This one could actually have been three separate ones - I had to spend a lot of time over the last 2-3 years figuring out how I thought and felt about the concepts, so there's a lot there - but since they all kind of fold into each other, it made sense to post them all together.
And fear is going to be a two-fer, because I kind of have to explain the wackiness that was going on before, before I get into what’s going on now.
Plain and simple, I don’t like fear. I don’t like being controlled by it, I don’t like it when fear shows up the door and announces that it’s in charge, it’ll be riding my back all day, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So, I saw two options – master fear, or be mastered by fear. And my means of mastering fear was to identify, “Ah. I am afraid of something. I will get in that something’s face and get on top of my fear of it.”
This is not the same thing as disrespect. I grasp the respect one has for the ocean, or for bears, or other things. There is a difference in changing my actions out of respect for what can happen, and pulling back inside myself because I’m scared.
The Bible tells us, over 300 times, some variation of, “Do not be afraid,” or, “Do not worry.” Yeah, some of it as addressed to specific people, specific situations (like every single time an angel shows up, which makes me think we have been SERIOUSLY underestimating angels in our artwork), but some of it isn’t. And that got me thinking, in some of those fall afternoons kicking around the woods talking things out with God*, WHY He might not want me to be afraid.
*Note on that – I started talking with God, looking for God, when I was seventeen. Reconciling the God I knew with the God in the Bible, and agreeing that I needed to live life His way (not that I always do, but I need to) didn’t happen until I was a few months shy of 20. That’s a story for another day. Point is, a lot of these conversations happened when I wasn’t yet a Christian.
But, I worked out that if I chose to be afraid, or to worry, knowing that God had told me not to, then I was choosing to be disobedient. Also, that if He told me not to do this, then it must be something I DID have choice in, it wasn't something that just happened to me. This was kind of a breakthrough when I was in college - learning that I could decide whether or not to be afraid, or to worry. Very cool when I learned how. I loved not being "under" fear any more.
I don’t know why other people do fear. I know what the Jedi teach, interestingly enough – the reason the Jedi are forbidden to love is because loving anything outside yourself, they believed, was to base your happiness on something outside yourself. Shucks, I knew when I was eight that if you based your happiness on something outside yourself you risked losing it – once I learned about Alzheimer’s, and how scary it can be to lose part of yourself, I realized that if I didn’t want to be afraid, I REALLY had to be careful with what I chose to base my happiness on. Anyway, if your base was something outside yourself, and you lost that something, you would lose your happiness. If you were constantly thinking that, you’d have fear. If you had fear, you would be tempted to do things that you knew weren’t good, because you wanted to be free of fear.
Note on THAT – I see fear as being twinned with hope. When I feel fear, it’s because I think something undesirable might happen. When I KNOW something undesirable is going to happen, I don’t spend a lot of time on fear – I start packing up and preparing for whatever it is. When I don’t know what to prepare for, and I know I don’t have the time or other resources to prepare for all the possibilities I can think of, then I feel fear.
There was also the point - I don't know if other people do this, but once I looked at the times when I felt fear or worry, really looked at them and turned them over, they were all things where I wasn't trusting God. Either I didn't believe that God was big enough to handle this, or it was somehow outside His control, or that He wasn't the kind of person who would take care of this sort of thing. And it wasn't that I had decided this on a conscious level - just that you can usually get an idea of what a person believes by the way they act.
(For example: If I believe my parents are coming over this weekend, I will take a few evenings in and clean up the apartment so they don't believe I live like a slob. If I think my parents MIGHT come over, it'll depend on what's going on that week, weighing the risk. If I'm pretty sure they won't be, I will go out Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, giving no time whatsoever to my house-maintenance, and crash all Saturday morning until I drag myself out to do laundry. Similar argument came up for whether or not I believed there was a God.)
I'm gradually learning that I can spend 10-15 minutes before something freaking out and hoping it goes well, or I can say, "God, I know You've got this, my role is not to freak, it's to do the best with what You've given me and trust You for the results." That's a combination of taking what I've learned from the Bible and friends, and seeing if it does apply to my life. You'd probably find your own combination.
My views on fear mean that when I get the impression someone is talking to me and trying to get me on board with THEIR fear, I usually dig my heels in. “I don’t submit to my own fear, why would I submit to yours?” It’s not that I don’t listen to it at all, now – nor do I get up in the face of whatever scares me. The Gentleman had a lot to do with that – more on that later. Fear, now, is one advisor on a board of about 12. Useful in its place, lets me know other information I need to factor in when making a decision, but it’s not an authority in any way. And I like it that way.
Security, I am convinced after watching a lot of the forms of “security,” break, security is an illusion. Possibly a necessary one. We don’t really have “security,” we have the feeling of security, which allows us to say, “Very good, this piece is taken care of, I can now focus on other things.” But it’s like a kid’s “security blanket.” Any true guarantee has to be a lie, because there’s too much about life that people can’t guarantee.
Since I don’t really believe any form of security is infallible, I would say I don’t believe in security. This is not to say that I do not trust.
Example – there is a particular job I do on a regular basis that requires me to wear a certain amount of safety gear. There was a time when I was depending on said safety gear to hold me, as it is supposed to, and it didn’t – I dropped. Now, I didn’t drop FAR before I caught myself, and then clung to the ladder in question until I’d calmed my nerves (usually I do this by singing little songs to myself while I’m working, or postulating on penguins – something fairly innocent and unimportant that is GREATLY important because I’m using it to take care of something that matters), and then got back to work. It didn’t cause me to stop climbing, to stop trusting my safety gear, or to stop wearing my safety gear. Just reminded me that it CAN fail, and I’d best be prepared in case it does.
I approach a lot of life that way. I still trust. I just look at things, consider what could happen if what I’m trusting fails, and am I prepared to deal with that if it does? And until someone stared at me incredulously, I hadn’t realized that this wasn’t what everyone did to cope with life in this world.
Safety is different. Safety, I am convinced, is just relative, like light and dark. I can be more safe if I do these things, or am in this place rather than that one. I don’t see it in terms of, “Ah, now I am safe, nothing can get to me.” Locking the door behind me means it is HARDER for something to get to me.
I had a car accident when I was 20. The nice deputy who pulled me out of the passenger-side window said that there was no way I should have walked away from that. Praise the Lord. But, one effect of it was that I made peace with my death during that roll. Really, I thought I was going to die then – and once I realized that I hadn’t, I saw no reason to UNmake that peace.
I’m not afraid of death, but I can be very motivated by pain, and I know it. (By contrast, a longtime friend of mine will bravely take on terrific amounts of pain, but still fears death. We fit well with each other.)
Given that I see a fair amount of life as an adventure, I’m not usually all that keen on locking things out. The Gentleman and I have had a few talks about this, and after some time I was able to understand that I matter to him, and he would see it as an expression of how I care about him if I would take care of myself. This makes sense to me.
These aren’t so much ideas that I came up with out of the blue. A lot of philosophizing happened over the last few years when the world I had to live in didn’t match the one I had prepared myself for. These are mostly the tools I’ve found to get what done what I need to in the current environment. Later, in other places, I will likely find other tools. I’m not much concerned about that – for now, I have something that works. I only really change it when it stops working.
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