Sunday, 15 September 2013

What Do You Fear?

It seems as I progress along my journey that my fears have changed. It used to be that I feared being average, and boring, and unable to excel at anything. That's why I pushed myself into misery trying trying trying to be something. I suppose it was a fear that I didn't matter. But in my pursuit to matter to others, I never learned to matter to me. Can I ever be successful in believing I matter to others if I never matter to myself? What exactly does that mean, to matter to myself? Do you feel that you matter to you, to your well-being, to your happiness?

I think it means to determine what matters to me, and then figuring out how I want to stand up for that matter. That is a quality I have always admired in others, people who know who they are, what they are about, what's important to them. I don't want to follow along anymore, too concerned with what others think of me to take any kind of stand. Now I'm only going to pay attention to what I think. Like a quote I saw in a bookstore that went something like this: Does the tiger worry what the sheep thinks?

What is it that I fear now? I fear that greed will destroy the natural paradise in which we live, without which we cannot survive; I fear getting swallowed up by the small details and losing track of the big beautiful picture of meaningful relationships, with people, nature, and myself; I fear that too many people are disconnected from each other and the world around them; and I fear failing my children by not teaching them to believe in themselves or to only worry about what they think or to find out what matters to them. And so I take action now to address those fears, to use them to guide me forward in every decision I make, and to continue to mull them over so that I may conquer them, each and every day.

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