The Greek Philosopher, Epictetus, once said –
“I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.”
Can you single out one person in your life who has not experienced fear in any shape or form? Not entirely. We’ve all experienced fear in some way or the other. However, some people know how to navigate through fear, feel it and leave it, while some don’t.
What happens when we fear the inevitable like death or a bad separation is we tend to project that fear onto other things as well. This may not be true for everyone but sometimes, one’s fear is often cause for one’s limitation toward living life to the fullest.
This brings me to the concept of Scared or Sacred.
Scared or Sacred?
Fear has a way of creeping up on us through a different set and range of emotions. It could be:
- Insecurities of the self
- Doubts about the future
- Anticipation of a higher, near-impossible goal
- Negative thoughts
- Experience of long-term stress
- Negatively learned responses from early life
Before we know it, we no longer wish to carry this baggage of fear, given its endless loop of imagined outcomes. It is then that the mind and the heart have to work together to transition from a scared to a sacred state of mind.
The fearful mind is often scared to expose oneself to the various experiences of life.
But as we desire things in life, we tend to have expectations of how we want the outcome to turn out for us. At the same time, our fears (if any) lead us to build assumptions of what is likely to turn out not quite as we expected.
So, we put ourselves through an endless loop of fear that feeds on our fun for life. That is when we get too serious about life. You can bravely say that fear is the energy guzzler of our lives.
Love, Laugh, and Lighten up!
Maybe we should put this saying on a wall, either in the house or at the workplace – Love, Laugh, and Lighten up. It should be on a wall that you frequently look up, so it’s there whenever you need a reminder.
If you are constantly sad and serious, you cannot be happy. For instance, go to a concert in a bad mood, carrying with you the weight of the world. You are not going to enjoy that concert unless you leave your baggage at the gates.
“It’s not about where you are headed that’s going to make a difference to how you feel. It’s about what you allow yourself to feel that’s going to make a difference in your life.”
~Krescon Coaches
So, being scared is not the answer when it comes to leading your life. Being sacred is all about being happy, and having a smile on your face because it radiates from within. However, when you are scared, you are unable to feel anything naturally. All you can feel is fear and negativity about an outcome that has not yet come to fruition.
However, some people have abundant seriousness in them rather than having abundant fun for life. Even a simple smile does not appear on their faces. A smile is not trivial but the starting point where you add yourself to life rather than cut away from it.
The limited milestones added by fear
Fear limits our ability to transcend in life.
For instance, when you read a self-help book, it already has all the wisdom you need from it. However, it’s not really the wisdom that you can gain but rather the direction. The author who had the wisdom has translated it to you through the book. But you cannot immediately adopt that wisdom unless you expose yourself to its experience.
Ashes of knowledge are left behind once it is translated into wisdom, and that is what you get from a book. This is why many people find it hard to practice something from a book because they have not experienced the author’s findings yet.
Only when one experiences the love, laughter, and light of life will one deal with the fear of it. Most children will often do what you tell them not to do and only when they experience will they no longer need it. For example, you tell a child not to jump on the edge of the bed but the child doesn’t listen. Only when the child falls and hurts himself or herself will he or she be more cautious the next time the edge of that bed calls to them.
Therefore, sacredness comes from living life and experiencing it. It does not come from being scared of it because you are causing yourself to miss out on certain aspects. Missing on the significant aspects of life is not pure which is why you could opt to love, laugh, and lighten up and this refers to your Spiritual Quotient (SiQ).
