What is
fear?
This is a question that I had not thought of.
Not like I
haven’t felt fear, it has been with me as a friend, haranguing me, pushing
me, pulling me, maybe sometimes even motivating me.
Come to
think of it, it has been like a very close friend, who just knows everything
about you.
A closed
confidant of mine, like an invisible Hobbes to my Calvin.
Never
visible to the external world, hidden behind my façade.
If someone
would have asked me what is it that I wanted, I always used to say I want to be
fearless.
I kept
repeating this “I want to be fearless” mantra so many times that it almost
seemed like an immutable truth.
So all I
kept doing was to chant this mantra, consciously and subconsciously, infinity
times over, and then some more.
The more I
reinforced this mantra, the more fearful I became.
Fearlessness
became the protagonist of what seemed like a twisted, dark psychological
thriller which almost always lost out to my old friend, the so-called villain.
Outsmarted,
outmaneuvered at every turn.
Behind
every dream that I didn’t pursue, any time I took a wrong decision when I felt
I let someone down or even when I did not even make a decision, it just stood
by me, rock-solid, mocking me of my fearlessness.
And this
fear seemed like it was just with me, deeply running like blood through my
veins when everyone else seemed to have the right ingredients in their DNA.
Abruptly
cutting it short though, someone said as an answer to what is fear made me
think about it for the first time.
Fear as an
objective, natural kind of phenomenon, without the taboo I had associated with it
and by extension myself (myself a taboo – kind of funny when you think about it).
“Fear is
measured by the degree one is separated by oneself and others”, was the rough
translation of what I understood from that answer.
It made
sense to me, and not just at an intellectual level, but an experiential one.
Not from
the books I have read, but from the experiences of the times when I am connected,
and connected so very deeply with the world beyond me, my tiny little world so
to speak.
Whenever
that happened, I was alive, at that moment and for that moment, fear took a
backseat.
It was there,
very much there but slightly benevolent, not as frowny and maybe even relaxed.
May be now
I understand what goes on that battlefield and how can some mere mortals go
above and beyond.
Fear is a
permanent fixture but its gravitational pull is inversely proportional to the connectedness of my tiny little bit with the whole wide world, a world with
folks who are dealing with their fears , moment to moment.
