To start the day right includes resolving to not be afraid today.
This is not a matter of circumstances, personality, mood or luck. To not be
afraid is a conscious decision that only you can make for yourself, and if you
start the day with it you can give yourself at least five minutes (or with
practice, hours) of feeling comparatively calm and confident.
We like to dignify fear as a rational, biologically evolved response
to a challenging situation, essential to survival, etc, etc. But the truth is
that fear makes you less able to deal with difficulties, not more; more
isolated and small, not less. And to be afraid in advance as a form of self-defence against whatever might happen is even more
self-undermining.
Feeling afraid is a response to your own expectations and
imaginings and to how you have depicted a situation in your mind. You can
decide not to be afraid today even if you do not think you are anyway. We avoid
the word; are more likely to use words like stressed,
tense, anxious, concerned, annoyed, or more likely still to complain that
someone else is bugging you or being a pain, or that we are victims of a bad situation,
rather than to call ourselves frightened.
But the Course suggests that we are more fearful than we realize. Our occupations
and entertainments serve the primary - but unrecognized - purpose of diverting our
awareness away from a perpetual, profound state of anxiety that we never want
to look at, that we deal with only indirectly, piecemeal and by calling it by
other names:
The ego can and does
allow you to regard yourself as supercilious, unbelieving,
"light-hearted", distant, emotionally shallow, callous, uninvolved
and even desperate, but not really afraid. Minimizing fear, but not its
undoing, is the ego's constant effort, and it is indeed a skill at which it is
very ingenious (T11 V 9).
To begin the day by deciding not to be afraid today may sometimes,
then, make you uncomfortably aware of how much more apprehensive you are of
more people and situations, past, present and to come, than you want to accept. Or it might seem absurd to reflect on anxieties that do not apparently
exist at all if you are cheerfully unaware of them. We think it unhealthy to think
about fear at all, for fear of scaring ourselves. We may be superstitiously
afraid to say, silently, decisively, deep inside, 'I will not be afraid today'.
The unconscious does not understand negatives, we are told. Merely by dwelling
on the idea 'I will not be afraid,' might we be tempting fate, brainwashing
ourselves into fearfulness? But if we are really not afraid, 'I will not be
afraid today' happily confirms and celebrates that fact. And if we are, it is time we recognized
it so that we can decide otherwise. Not looking at our many, complex, underground insecurities is how we preserve
them.
You may still complain
about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful T2 7
You are responsible for your thoughts and their consequences,
the Course keeps reminding us. We can conjure up beliefs, fears, experiences,
and we can also change them. I will not
be afraid today is a reminder that you can choose your response to anything
that happens. It is a way to start the day with an open mind, and to go to meet
the day's surprises, disappointments, confusions, conflicts, injustices,
challenges, dark nights of the soul and sabre-toothed tigers with a clearer
mind and no cold shrinking of the heart.
Postscript: Just after I wrote this, I read that the funeral
of the poet Seamus Heaney took place today. Apparently his final words to his
wife were 'Do not be afraid.' We would all do well to start the day, every day,
with the same message to ourselves, to everyone we love. To everyone.
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