A Grain of Sand

Fear is a powerful thing. It can paralyze you. It can make you feel every possible powerful negative emotion imaginable. Fear spawns hatred. The kind of hatred that makes people insanely aggressive toward things they don't understand. Fear traps you in its grip of depression and anxiety in an unending spiral. Fear keeps you from living your dreams.

I live in fear. I'm one of those people who worries constantly about my life and is so afraid of making a move that even though I might have trudged a thousand miles, I haven't really gone anywhere. It's fear that's kept me down. It's fear that's kept me living in my past. It's fear that's helped to continue the very cycle I have spent my whole life desperately hoping would end. And never did anything about. Out of fear.

Something someone said today made me think. It's not that it was anything prophetic or even profound. It was just a few simple words. Not even relevant to this writing. But it made me pause just long enough to look very hard at life itself. Not some strange metaphysical journey. Reality. And the reality was fear. Everything I've done or felt or thought about has been consumed by fear of the unknown or fear of what might happen if I actually made a choice. And the reality is, I never really made many choices. I simply let things happen. From a scientific standpoint, my life has been the epitome of chaos. Random happenings with no sense of order.

Driving clears my head. Ironically, when I need to clear my head I just randomly drive in no particular direction. Today I ended up somewhere I needed to go without realizing it until I got there. I won't tell you where I ended up. It's a very private, personal thing. The point is that it opened my mind and helped me to understand my life for what it is and what I need to do about it.

It's true that I've made some very healthy choices these last few months, but not enough of them. Just enough to get me by. But getting by is just surviving and just surviving isn't happiness. Getting by is simply staying in the same fearful comfort zone and never really going anywhere.

I'm not saying I'm going to wake up tomorrow surrounded by choirs of singing angels and a red cape with a big "S" on it. I'm still going to make some stupid mistakes. Because I'm human. But I'm going to try to really see more of what's going on around me. Because now I know the truth.