With only a one simple switch
Do you remember the shadows in your bedroom when you were little? The moment when the light turned off, the familiar faces disappeared from the doorway to have their own night and special time. Do you remember how everything in that familiar place changed with one flick of a finger when it became dark? How the shadows grew in instant and everything became something much more than it seemed to before, everything changed shape and nothing was like you had believed. You were so sure about the fact that it was your room attacking you and all the things in there were moving, talking and waiting to come and get you. There trying to stare at the sealing, saying you’re not scared, you’re not scared… still hiding under the blanket and trying to make it go away.
Fear. That’s what stops us so many times, makes us hide and keep us from doing things we would love to do. It starts well, we think that this is fun, we go along and we enjoy but then it comes and hits us. We stop. We can’t move. Breathing changes from relaxed to heavy and we don’t blow out anymore. We feel with our every cell that blood is running faster telling us to run with it to escape. That’s when the light switches off. The darkness with bad memories from the past come to play in front of our eyes. They repeat themselves over and over again like a shadow circus someone left on replay. It suck the joy right out of the moment. They play with your feelings making you believe that courage is something never existed in you even though you so proudly try to show to everyone that you’re not afraid of anything.
The thing is that usually it’s much bigger in our head than it is in real life. It makes it just worse when you see others do it so easy and you can’t. It makes us feel worse and the thing itself becomes even greater because it causes us the feelings of weakness and worthlessness in the first place. Then we feel even more stupid because we kind of know it’s not that big and we must be weak because we just can’t do it, we panic if we try and that, if nothing else, makes us feel small and at the same time the thing seems to be impossible.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that
something else is more important than fear.”
― Ambrose Redmoon
But here’s the thing. Panic hinders our thoughts and stops rational thinking. It requires a lot of mindful presence to interfere with the panic, to know that anything bad is not going to happen. It takes a lot of strength from the mind to see that actually this is just an illusion we’re creating, a circle we go around to avoid facing it. It is hard to break it and to remember in that moment (when we're about to give up anf walk away) what is more important. That's the moment where we need to cut the circle, take the leap of faith and just try. It takes a second to realize it's over, that you did it but then the real process begins. You have to find out who you are without the fear and the limits it created.
Many of the people I know might not believe it if they knew how scared kitty cat I can be. I can make problems just about anything and make it grow huge in my head... like phone calls with some official status and exact time and date - gosh! They terrify me! But I manage them anyway. Because how would I know if that one phone call I am afraid of was the one that will change my life? That would be such a stupid thing to regret later. In the end, fear in most times in our life is nothing more than the shadows that appear when the light is turned off. Sometimes we do need a little help to find the switch but still, Dumbledore was so right, you know...
