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Fear and Failure, How to Cope

Working through failure is hard enough, but working through fear and failure is a difficult cocktail to tolerate.  These two things have a way of feeding into each other.  Fear breeds failure, failure breeds fear.  Stopping that cycle is critical and the good news is that stopping one likely stops both.  

I am the type of person that doesn't really know who he is - sometimes I feel like a gym rat who loves heavy metal.  At other times, I enjoy tea and some lofi beats music soaking up airspace in the background.  The forces of macho and kindness don't know what to do with each other.  I am still figuring out how to push and pull those different levers.  Recently, in my journey of overcoming both fear and failure, I went back to my meditative practices.  As part of that journey, I went back to an oldie but a goodie:

“All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don’t dare to leave the nest. Here we sit in a nest that’s getting pretty smelly and that hasn’t served its function for a very long time. No one is arriving to feed us. No one is protecting us and keeping us warm. And yet we keep hoping mother bird will arrive. We could do ourselves the ultimate favor and finally get out of that nest. That this takes courage is obvious. That we could use some helpful hints is also clear. We may doubt that we’re up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

I was actually blown away by this blurb.  It's probably my own ignorance, but I did not expect Pema, the Tibetan Buddhist to be so brutally clear about life.

She says we are literally afraid to leave the nest.  Her call to action is that we are too soft.  We're too afraid.  We're wallowing in this nest of worry and fear - allowing it to swallow our hopes, dreams, ambitions, and sense of pride.  How embarrassing.

But the line that hit me the hardest - "No one is arriving to feed us."  Holy crap.  Read that again.  No one is coming to feed you.  No one.  It's on you.  Figure it out.  Leave the nest.

I find this incredibly liberating - the idea that you need to "man" or "woman" up and get the job done.  Helplessness is sure to drive both fear and failure.  We all possess some level of capability or ability to feed ourselves.  We should do so.  

May we all shed that fear and go feed ourselves.

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