The Fear We Keep Running From
Okay guys, I learnt something rather brilliant last week. I was having ice cream with Aliyah and her friend Julie, whom I was meeting for the first time. Julie is a travel blogger and, as she put it, is on a “perpetual holiday.” Naturally, I asked her about the most exciting thing she had seen lately. She told me about the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. If you don't know it, the idea is simple and honestly a little insane, people running through the streets ahead of a group of charging bulls. My immediate reaction was: Why on earth would anyone volunteer for this? I did a little reading afterwards and discovered something interesting about the tradition. For the participants, it is about excitement, bravery, competition, tradition, simply proving something to themselves or overcoming the fear. And that got me thinking. Not about bulls. About fear. Because perhaps the strange thing about human beings isn't that we are afraid. Could it be that we keep finding ways to face what scares us? For thousands of years, humans have walked into storms, crossed oceans, climbed mountains, entered battlefields, stood on stages, asked difficult questions, fallen in love and sometimes simply knocked on someone's door to have a conversation they had been avoiding. The circumstances change. The feeling doesn't. We keep asking ourselves, What if it doesn't work? What if they say no? What if I fail? What if I lose them? What if I am not good enough? Some of us run toward our fears, few of us walk around them and few like me choose to become talented at finding other things to do instead. I'm well experienced in that last one. But here's something I've been wondering about. A fear doesn't necessarily become smaller because we avoid it. Sometimes it simply becomes more familiar. We learn its shape. And perhaps that is why dealing with our fears matters. Not because we should become fearless. That sounds exhausting. Because there may be someone on the other side of a fear you've been carrying. Sometimes confronting a fear doesn't just change us. It changes our relationships. Someone you haven't spoken to. Someone you need to forgive. Someone you need to thank. Someone you miss. Or perhaps, someone who has been waiting for you to say something you've been afraid to say. So don't think about your biggest fear. Rather think about a small fear that has quietly been making a decision for you. We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to avoid uncomfortable feelings. But sometimes the uncomfortable feeling is simply the price of getting somewhere meaningful. And perhaps the smartest thing to do isn't to run faster. Maybe, it's to stop running. What is the thing in your life, if you stopped running from, you know you need to face? On a lighter note, Julie has also inspired me to take a vacation in the middle of October. Nothing involving charging bulls, I promise. I'm looking for somewhere new, somewhere I've never been, and preferably somewhere where the most dangerous thing is an overpriced sandwich. If you do know of a place worth discovering, do share, I'm listening. Happy Saturday, Bob.
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