I fear many things. Death and the devil make me nervous. I am afraid evil things might happen to people I am care about. The enterprise is always on my mind. Will we manage to get the turnover we need? And also, I very often fear I might make a mistake – or have made one in the past.
When that happens, I ask myself if, maybe, this is not a little over the top. Basically, I am, after all, not a fearful person, am I? Most of my worries are, apparently, some sort of “fear of the bogeyman“. And I think I am far too worried about all the many accidents that might happen.
But then, to my surprise, I notice that other people are mostly even more worried than I am. And some of them are really suffering.
The richest of my friends suffers from the fear of losing his livelihood. Whenever I ask him what he thinks he will need all that money for, he tells me he might get a really complex illness – and then he would wish to get the best possible medical treatment. Which really might be quite costly.
Another one of my friends gets a nice pension and lives in his mortgage-free house. His wife is younger than he and a civil servant. They also have additional security to fall back on in old age. But he is afraid of what it might mean financially if he were to become a nursing case. Mind you, the financial side is more worrying for him than the actual fact of perhaps being “nursing case”.
The couple has some children and are always worried something evil might happen to the kids. Mother is afraid that her daughter might act “stupidly”. After all, she wishes for her offspring to have a better start in life than she had …
One female friend can never leave home without carrying her mobile phone, because otherwise she would be afraid this might be the one time the cell-phone would have been necessary for saving her life …
This is how I can think of more and more people who are no longer courageous. Instead, they let themselves be downtrodden by fear. Full of anxieties, they have abandoned the flourishing of their life in many dimensions. Instead, they have reduced their horizons totally needlessly.
And then I remember that all this fear basically happens between the ears. And that the better off we are, the more we get strangely worried. And the more safety there is all around us, the more we feel exposed.
Those are the people I wish to address with vehemence:
Abandon all fear! Take heart!
Because happiness, too, happens between the ears. And happiness is what we want to promote. It will give us even more courage. And joy along with it. And with joy, there will be success. That is the only way to minimize fear.
My good intension is:
I want to promote feeling joyful about the small things in life, thus not giving fear of all the evil and potential risk and hazards around me the slightest chance.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
Loading ...