I’m still surprised when acquaintances, friends, anyone, will describe me as some version of: courageous, fearful, unafraid.
So many of my emotional memories from childhood are of being scared. Fearful to fall back asleep at night; fearful to stay awake. Stomach aches from anxious thoughts, wishing to shrink and disappear in so many moments, watching from the (literal) sidelines as other kids played.
And yet, that wasn’t the whole story. (It never is.) We all have our flavors, forms and shapes of bravery, and sometimes we forget that, I think. I was always ready for something new. I threw myself into hobbies and play groups, too, and I always threw my hand up in class, eager to learn, answer and share.
As my friend Dawn says, fear can be a beautiful thing. It can show us where we need to go, and where we’re meant to grow.
Fear has always been here with me, and I think because it loomed so large, I learned early on the befriend it. That I couldn’t ignore it, but I could work with it, and invite it to play.
Tara Moher talks of two types of fear from Jewish tradition and the Hebrew language: Pachad and Yirah.
Pachad is “projected or imagined fear,” the “fear whose objects are imagined.” That, in contemporary terms, is what we might think of as overreactive, irrational, lizard brain fear: the fear of horrible rejection that will destroy us or the fear that we will simply combust if we step out of our comfort zones.
There is a second Hebrew word for fear, yirah. Rabbi Lew describes yirah as “the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to inhabiting. It is also the feeling we feel when we are on sacred ground. (www.taramohr.com/dealing-with-fear/my-favorite-teaching-about-fear/)
Fear, too, invites me to play. To go toward the things that scare me. It’s the flutter that’s motivated me to move countries, change careers, leave jobs, stay still, say yes, say no and enter relationships.
The quote says that everything we want is on the other side of fear. I’ve learned I never know what’s there for me, on the other side, unless I take the steps to actually go and see. From there I can choose, and we can always change, yes. And I’ve always become the better for reaching the other side.
Change is scary. It’s also exciting, full of possible impossibility and ripe with opportunity.