What Are You Afraid Of?
Trust you are feeling positive today. I happened to bump into my old golfing friend Brad yesterday. He looked different. A little more tanned, certainly. But there was something else about him. He seemed lighter somehow. When I asked him about it, he told me he had just returned from Thailand, where he had gone scuba diving with his girlfriend. That surprised me. “You went scuba diving?” I asked. Brad laughed. “Bob, you know I’ve always been afraid of the water.” Apparently, on a moment of weakness, he had agreed to go. The first time he went underwater, he was terrified. But then something happened. After two sessions, he began to relax. He started noticing what was beneath him, the colours, the fish, and the strange and beautiful world that had been hidden just below the surface. “The funny thing is,” he told me, “after a while I felt like a fish.” He had confronted something that frightened him. And on the other side of that fear was something he hadn't expected: confidence. That conversation stayed with me. I started wondering about fear itself. Where does it come from? Is it something that happened to us when we were young? Something someone once told us? Or perhaps simply a story we have repeated to ourselves for so long that we stopped questioning it? And then I remembered something my grandfather told me many years ago. Sometimes, he said, the best way to make a fear smaller is to walk towards it. Although, strangely enough, I haven't been particularly good at following his advice. I have a fear of cats. Yes. Cats. So, after talking to Brad, I found myself thinking that perhaps it is time I stopped avoiding mine. Who knows? Maybe one day you'll find me with a cat sitting comfortably on my lap. And perhaps I'll discover that the thing I was afraid of was never quite as frightening as I had imagined. Fear has a curious habit. The longer we avoid something, the larger it can become in our imagination. But sometimes, when we finally turn around and face it, we discover that courage isn't the absence of fear. It is simply the decision to take a step while the fear is still there. And sometimes, on the other side of that step, is a version of ourselves we haven't met yet. What about you? Have you ever confronted a fear and how did it go? Until tomorrow, Bob.
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