why is that when we spend good quality time psyching ourselves up for something it just takes a momentary thought to shut us right back down?

yeah. fear sucks. i choose to use the word fear instead of doubt. doubt might be a learned cautious approach from experience and it can rightly have a place in your day to day life. for the moment let’s assume it is a means to be more open minded. fear to me however tends to be more irrational than from experiencial occurrence. it isn’t that fear has no base in experience, it has to have some, but that we generally kick it up a notch from healthy to irrational. there is a certain preservation stance from recognizing that unless you’re trained for it, trying to walk across a rope between two buildings without any net under you is probably not the right time to make plans for tomorrow.

i have tried to meditate on this and really try to live in the now. it’s hard to gauge just how ‘well’ i’m doing with it. i can’t say some days because it’s more like some moments i’m doing well and others i’m thinking about the past, present and future and might be concerned about something.

as i see it fear takes on two forms: internal thoughts and external thoughts.

internal thoughts are those where we are thinking about bills or ourselves. external thoughts are wondering about an activity or if the person walking on the same sidewalk is going to (insert something bad) you when they get close enough. basically when i’m thinking about myself inside my head and wondering about effecting the world and when i’m how the world is going to effect me.

i can strive to work on myself and how i react to events. i can also try and work on myself before things even happen. and of course after something happens to try and work on that fear. because i was scared of the open water i learned how to swim. when that wasn’t enough, i learned how to scuba dive. for my fear of heights i started to take of skydiving. i only made it through my first two AFF jumps. the fear has caught me since then. i hope to be able to work through it and try again. maybe with a step backward and with a tandem jump. i realize my methods for myself are drastic to others but they’ve worked so far. ladders don’t scare me as much and being under the ocean is majestic. so many fears and so much work to do. i should get back to pondering and figure out what i want to work on next inside myself.

-Santa’s Fallen Angel