To personify an emotion is to give it power.
Lately I’ve found myself bowing to one emotion able to discourage me from travel planning, travel dreaming, travel doing… and on that note, from bigger, more enriching things in this life. It’s spelled F-E-A-R.
It’s not fear of being a passenger on a doomed flight or the victim of a kidnapping a la “Taken” that gets me. Not fear of someone planting coke in my luggage, “Brokendown Palace” style. Not even fear of not being able to get back home, or worse, at least in my head, being kicked out of that country at my most fructiferous time there. No, these are run-of-the-mill, almost cliche fears. It’s of something else. It’s the thought of leaving home at the wrong time, interrupting what could be; what’s more, interrupting the path and the purpose I could follow should I not leave.
It’s the type of hindrance that makes financial responsibility an obsession, instead of the balancing, sensibility mechanism it should be. It makes me not want to move, at all. After all, I have to think this through, think of the future, think of the one hundred and one ways my plans could fail, right?
I suppose to corral fear to the travel aspect is to be naive…amateur and whiny at best. I know it’s all these things. Fear pervades other areas of my life. I despise writing about it, but know that I fight best when exposing its ugly nature. Most recently, this absurd feeling is the invisible boundary keeping me from pursuing writing in full. It doesn’t make much sense. But when I stop to ponder it, I catch the culprit in the act. Why spend free time after my 9-5 in front of the tube or reading a book that could easily bear my name on the cover? Fun and entertainment is much easier than creating, and yields no disappointment or failure.
There is a bright, shining ember in this predicament. For a moment I place myself in my 4th grade class. It’s my day to present to the class, and the topic is: The person you admire the most. If it’s the me today standing up there, I say: the people I admire the most at the moment are full-time artists, singer-songwriters, musicians, actors, activists, human rights workers, missionaries, evangelists…people working in a creative, unstructured, “break the mold” kind of medium. Why? Because it means that at some point they decided not to let fear interrupt or stall their lives. They took the risk. They jumped and now they’re living out their passion, and some, much more importantly, their purpose. I admire them. In that sense I think I’d like to be more like them. I think I can.
I acknowledge the role of faith in getting over this type of obstacle. I think it’s what allows most people to dare to duel fear and win. I don’t box the word “faith” into a stodgy, religious definition. By faith I mean the understanding that things could turn out okay, whatever direction I choose to go in, and not because of something I did. This omnipotent creator we call God…I think it’s essential He help us deal with this solely human emotion. And I think asking and believing for success in that aspect with help from above is what inevitably takes some amount of faith.
If I want to move, travel, hop on a plane or train, or reach my goals, travel enthusiast or not, I’ve got to give up the ghost of F-E-A-R.
Have I done it again? Given it center stage, so that it wields power over me. Nah. I feel instead a certain emotion surrendering itself before my decision to bare it to the world and the man upstairs. End match. I think I’m ready to make some confident decisions.
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