Fear Equals Failure

Fear Equals Failure

Fear Equals Failure

In response to a post that I accidentally leaked to LinkedIn:

Jan Löwgren responded "I wish I had your courage John."

I would have responded there, but I have left LinkedIn behind as it has descended into being just another vapid, narcissistic social media shitshow. By that I mean no offense to the real people there, who know what my words mean and that I have excepted them from that generalization. Keep the humor and the resistance going without me for now. Anyway, I'm certain that this post will contain more characters than they allow in a comment and I'm tired of splitting things up to meet their ridiculous ancient obsolete ineffective spam filtering rules. That whole site is spam.

Back to the topic at hand. Fear is a real enemy. Fear is known to lead humans to poor decisions, to knee-jerk reactions that might have been appropriate for hunters but do not meet their original purposes in the modern world. Fear of nonconformance leads to groupthink. Fear is the root of greed. If I am afraid that I might not be able to feed my children tomorrow, then I want to stockpile today. Some people get carried away with such paranoia and lose the plot completely. Fear leads to risk aversion, where there is a relationship between risk and reward. Everyone must define the boundaries appropriate for themselves.

Fear is like worry, and honestly, like most negative emotions such as anger and its typical root, perceived righteousness. Negative emotions are a waste of time and energy. Other than through actions, anger, resentment, hatred, and other feelings hurt their owners more than their targets. Emotions are not triggers to which one must react; they are signals to which one may chose how to respond. Especially in a complex universe and a living environment far removed from preindustrial circumstances, the reactive response is often sub-optimal at best.

I have not defeated fear in myself. I'm more aware of my cowardice than my courage. Maybe it is this awareness that causes some of my actions to appear brave. More importantly, I have simply accepted that life is suffering, that we all die, and that the process of death is often unpleasant, both for the deceasing and for those impacted by their suffering and eventual death.

And so. I embrace suffering and I look forward to the experience of death. While I don't expect to achieve the goal, attempting to maintain a Buddhist mindset of equanimity helps to reduce fearful reactions and my greedy human nature. So, how do we, especially Westerners, develop mindfulness? By attempting to be mindful. Personally, I cannot slow my thoughts enough to meditate in any traditional sense, so I have redefined mediation for myself as that state when my thoughts race as I'm trying to sleep, being aware of them but not following them intentionally, just letting them drift through my mind. Especially for anger, falling back on practiced thought stoppage and breathing exercises also helps. Reading helps. One great book for people suffering from such mental disturbances (it seems that many of us have various forms of extended childhood trauma):

I do not think there is any one real quick start to achieve mindfulness. I was lucky enough to be exposed to some Eastern philosophy early in life, which I always pursued, but was never really patient enough to understand. Living in Lao helps, but I also bring myself here, which is another problem. Specifically, I recommend researching the Samurai, warrior class of Japan's feudal period, and accepting that you are a ronin (a masterless samurai or wave-tossed man). This amazing short story might be a good start, although some readers may lack context:

I have benefited from reading this book several times and I like to give it as a gift for people who seek greater understanding of themselves.

Before my father died, I shared the following post to him, as he also was a student of Zen (and various other philosophies; I could write some books). Interestingly, at some point I had made this post private, apparently embarrassed of my own thoughts and words. No longer.

There's always more to write; nothing ever seems complete, especially when you look back at what you've already done. This is one of my fears; that I will disappear without completing my work, and that nobody is listening anyway. I think and write for myself; why am I thinking about others that will never share my experiences or truly understand my resulting thoughts? Bo Pen Nyang; nothing really matters.

Previous Publication

This article was previously published at the following URL:

Comments

You can comment on this topic here: