Fear Not…

“I am not afraid”. I ended a post last week with that sentence, but perhaps it could bear elaboration.

I am not afraid of death. Not so thrilled about the suffering that has to be endured before that happens, especially if it’s the painful death that seems to be in the cards for me. But I’m not afraid of no longer being alive.

I can’t tell you if the lack of fear comes from a spiritual, intellectual or emotional place inside of me, it just never occurred to me to be afraid of death. I realize that may sound strange to some, I’ve been told so up front many times. I don’t wish to diminish the fears that others may have about facing end of life, it’s just truly never been an issue with me for whatever reason.

Not that I’ve lived without fear. A friend gently asked me a few days ago if I could write about how fear has been addressed in my life, it’s taken me a few days of consideration to frame my thoughts.

I can’t leave any of you thinking that I’m some sort of kick-ass storm trooper who can face anything without trepidation. Far from it. But I’ll admit that at times I’d prefer it to look that way.

Admittedly, I don’t think I’m afraid of very many things. Now. I suspect that any courage that I’ve been able to muster in facing the challenges of recent years has come from having gone through some pretty harrowing ordeals in my lifetime. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried, it’s quite unbelievable that these challenges happened to one person in just one lifetime.

There have been obstacles that at times I simply believed could not be overcome. I can’t even begin to offer a formula for managing to get past them, for some I don’t know how I even did so. But generally, we do what needs to be done, dust ourselves off and hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

One significant fear that I’ve struggled with is the fear of letting others down. Throughout my life, pleasing others (or more so, not upsetting them) was an overriding concern. To the point that I often allowed myself to be diminished so that others could feel better about themselves, or permit them to do whatever pleased them to my own detriment. Sometime subjecting myself to abject cruelty as not to rock the boat.

Learning to assert my value as an equal to all others has been what I consider to be my last big lesson for this lifetime. Not that I’m terribly good at it yet, but making progress has lessened the fear that my tolerance of past disrespectful behaviour towards me has set a poor example for my daughter.

Not surprising to me, she’s been my greatest teacher for this lesson. Another fear that I can let go of before I leave, she’s on the right track and I’m grateful that I've been here long enough to learn from her. Perhaps her modus operandi will sometimes require her to do the opposite of what I would have done when facing difficult situations in her future; whatever gets the job done with her dignity and sense of self worth intact.