I spent much of my life dealing with fear, and it nearly destroyed me and damaged many of the people around me. It crippled me in so many important ways. It is always important to write about fear, so many people feel it and and are eager to understand it and leave it behind.

Fear in our culture is pervasive, promoted, encouraged and corrosive. It kills creativity, dreams, health,  love and peace of mind. I was into my sixth decade of life before I understood that I had two choices: either I could confront and control the fear that powered so much of my life, or it would consume me and deprive me of the opportunity to find fulfillment. It would also kill me, I knew, as it almost did, and more than once.

So I undertook a long and hard campaign to understand my fear and contain it. To regain perspective.  To find balance and strengthen the fragile center of me. To find peace and do my work.

In so many ways, our modern culture – politics, technology, aging, health, money – is built on different systems of fear. We live inside of fear’s terrain, it is a kind of ISIS of the mind.

We need to be frightened or we will not buy the things we are told we need, give up the work we love, save the money we are told we must have to live, to turn the news of fear and rage that is so profitable to others and so destructive to us. Fear is all around us, we hear it from family and friends, see it on TV, have it beamed into our consciousness by our addictive and intrusive gadgets. It is hardly possible to spend a single day away from it, so all the greater challenge to cope with it.

I came to see that fear was a geography, a space to cross. It was, very simply, the antithesis of life. It sucked the color and light and hope right out of the world around me, I was living the life of a hollow man, along and in perpetual panic. Everything around me seemed to feed it, my life, my family, my history, my soul.

I was fear’s partner, of course, I fed it and needed it. I came to see that it cannot live in me by itself, I have to let it in, open the door. But I could learn how to close the door, and I did.

in Corporate Nation even the weather has become a source of fear and alarm so that we will become addicted to it as well as all of the other bad news, because bad news is addictive, and good news is not. Because we are afraid to turn away from what we fear, not what we love. I learned to stop paying for fear, to stop giving money to the people who sell it, to turn to the light instead.

That is the curious way in which our human minds work. Animals know better, they run away from fear, they go as far as they can get. We look for it on our smartphones 100 times a day, we vote for it, argue for it, post the labels of fear right on our foreheads.

“There are two basic motivating forces,” wrote John Lennon, “fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace love.”

So I embraced life and love.I journeyed to the other side, a fearful passage in some ways. I did not really believe I could live outside of fear, it seemed too big and powerful for me.

My idea of the geography of fear helped to save me. I decided that I would not spend my remaining years in fear. I would not live for or by the fears of other people. I would reject the pleas and importunings of the corporations and politicians that profit by fear. I came to see that fear is often, if not always, a choice.

I am a citizen of the Fear Nation, but I also have free will, something I don’t need to buy or save for or deposit in a  bank for that day in the distant future that I can turn it over to my caretakers.

The more I rejected fear, the better my life got. The more I chose love, the more I opened to what life has to offer. The more I turned away from fear, the more creative I became. The more I chose self love over fear, the more I found friendship and community. The more I turned away from fear, the safer I felt. And was.

Anthropologists say humans have the emotions and instincts of fear because it was once so necessary to be fearful of much of what was around us, our lives depended on it. We don’t have to be so fearful any longer, we don’t have to believe everything we are told: that we can’t choose our own adventures, that we must be millionaires to age well, that our health needs to be in the hands of greedy, profit-making corporations, that nature and the weather is our enemy, that we can’t walk out dogs in the woods or drive them around in our cars.

I found that fear was a geography, and that I could see through to the other side of it, and go to the other side of it. It took help and will and discipline and practice. I always hope to write about fear and tell the many people who are tormented by it that there is another side of it, that it is a finite space. It is a geography, and that means it has boundaries. it is not an infinite space.

I must not fear, I refuse to live in that way. Life really is short and I do not choose to spend it in panic.

Fear is a kind of small death that obliterates the spirit and crushes hope. Every time I meet my fear again, I face it. I let it pass through me and up and down my spine. I turn to the color and the light, I re-affirm my faith in myself and my love for myself, I embrace my potential to create.

When the fear is gone, or when I pass through it’s terrain, there is nothing left of it. Only I remain, a testament to my decision to embrace life, not darkness. Fear is a choice.