Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

Addiction #35 – Freedom from FEAR
“Fear is your life’s only true opponent — only fear can defeat you. And it is a most
clever and insidious adversary, having no decency, respecting no law, and showing no
mercy. It always attacks our weakest points in our weakest moments, both of which it
identifies with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always – indeed, it resides there
exclusively, and as such, the only way to cleanse yourself of its sticky temptations is to
boldly shine the light of comprehension upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear
becomes a wordless darkness from which you ever shy away — perhaps which you even
manage to forget, you will only open yourself to its relentless and ever-more-massive
attacks.” ~ inspired by Yann Martel
“Fear cuts deeper than the sharpest of swords.” ~ inspired by George R. R. Martin
Fear — sometimes it arrives as a slicing angst that holds our hearts hostage. In other
moments, it is but a faintly gnawing uncertainty on the very edges of our awareness —
like the frigid caress from a childhood nightmare or the faintest whisper of a wound longsince
scarred over. It is the anxiety we feel when identifying a threat still unfamiliar, and
it is the dread we know while anticipating the reliving of a pain already endured.
Though a life without fear is a most reasonable goal for which to strive, fear is here to
stay — for to remove it permanently would also require the removal of the portion of the
human brain where fear permanently resides; the primitive stem that not only keeps air
flowing through our lungs, but that also keeps blood flowing through our veins. As such,
even though it is obvious to many that we cannot fully thrive alongside fear, our bodies
cannot survive at all without the portions of the brain that repeatedly send it to haunt our
waking days.
And it is not merely that our fear is incessantly reborn of this primal, unconscious,
biological directive. Most of us actually seem to be addicted to nourishing our fear – to
sitting it down at the dinner table once it arrives and feeding it sumptuous courses of
tragedy and drama and danger and uncertainty until we are literally stuffed with anxiety.
We watch the nightly news, we glue ourselves to our favorite soap operas, we engage in
critical gossip about the broken lives of our enemies, and we allow ourselves to be easily
bombarded with advertisements, warnings and political slogans designed to keep us
subconsciously timid & trembling.
As such, whether our fear is acute & invasive or
muted & hovering, it remains a tangible presence
in some form or another in every moment of our
existence.
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