Fear is a Gift

though it took me a long time to understand it that way.

These drawings came about this week, and I have to say at first I really didn’t understand what was going on. (Not an infrequent experience).

I remember a time, decades ago, when I had the sudden and shocking realisation that my life was driven, guided and fueled by fear. There wasn’t too much I could do about it at the time but just recognising the fact gave me a lot to think about.

Fear is a gift.

Not the cause of it - but the fear itself, the essential, vital, primal response to something dangerous and threatening. I certainly never thought about it as a gift way back then, although I did realise that it was telling me something - or many somethings - and that things had to change.

If you live in fear long enough, whatever the cause, it becomes habitual. And then it’s easy to trigger, and eventually you become afraid of fear itself.

Unpacking it is not easy. It's daunting, and confusing, and yes, frightening.

But looking at something unwelcome and dark, something totally unlooked for, and seeing it as a gift instead of an enemy - it makes a difference.

There's a poem by Rumi, The Guesthouse, which has always been a favourite of mine. Sometimes - rarely - the Unintentionals present me with antics that I realise later are a reference to a poem or a song or a quotation. This sequence happened a couple of years ago -

Right from the beginning the Missyts were keen to demonstrate the complications and difficulties of life and how to understand and navigate these confusions. And now I am exploring the world they inhabit, along with the Wissen people and the Ortook, I find them encountering many of the same problems in their world as those we grapple with ourselves. They know fear and anxiety, confusion and grief. They get lonely and angry and they turn to each other for help, just as they share their irrepressible love for life and their excitement at making new discoveries.

May your fears come in packages you can gently unwrap and disentangle, and may you find help from unlikely quarters.

XXX