How simple a thing it is to give your life and values and power over to fear, how difficult it can be to get your life and values back.
The reason many people fail to achieve the success they are capable of is because they are fearful, wrote Thomas Merton.
The main reason people are miserable and remain in bad relationships is because they are fearful. Many people end up making the wrong decisions again and again because they are living in fear, he said.
I confess to feeling at times that he was writing about me.
And I would add as a writing instructor that the main reason people fail to write or to show their work to the world is fear. You cannot write in fear, you can not write to protect or appease other human beings.
Merton believed that abiding in God helps people overcome their fears. I wish it were that clear for me. A religious person can say “it is God’s will,” but our time and our day, there is much confusion. Do you know what the call of life is for you?. If you don’t, how can you climb over the wall of fear we often find ourselves trapped in, how do you climb over it?
Most of us do not have this absolute faith the divine hand leading us, we are thrown back on ourselves, our values, we have to find that which is our calling, the thing which works for us as individuals? There is no one book for everyone.
I believe that abiding in ourselves and our own values also helps people to overcome fear, affirm their beliefs and values, and live the life they choose to live.
Maria and I both struggled to restore our values once we saw that we were living in fear. We were fortunate enough to find one another just as we were ready to accept this momentous understanding of our own situations.
We both understand that we lifted one another up, and gave the other the strength to try. To live out of fear. Nothing is more central to love. The rest was up to us.
As Merton wrote, fear kept us from doing what we were capable of doing, it kept us in relationships what were not right for us, it kept us living in our own personal failure, wallowing in anxiety and confusion.
I know people struggling with fear who do not have a clear sense of their own principles and beliefs, and their struggle is the hardest, there is little to hold back the fear. I know whereof I speak, I saw this happening to me in my sixth decade of life.
They dare not speak their voice, stand in their truth, live their own version of life. I believe that when values succumb to fear, or are overwhelmed by it, our lives are thrown out of balance, as I know too well, fear opens the door to living a substitute life, and empty life, not the one we wish to live.
For all my difficulties, I had a core belief system that never left me. I wanted to be a writer, a good husband and a good father and a good friend. I wanted to find love. I wanted to learn to be honest and understand the truth about myself. Few of these things were true, but I wanted them to be true.
I wanted to learn how to choose good and nourishing people to be around me, not people who would use me or exploit me. I wanted to write authentically.
Maria never lost her values, they were a bulwark, and ultimate barrier against the fear that sometimes consumed and misled her. She wanted to find love. She wanted to do her art. She wanted family to be a choice, not an oppressive obligation. She wanted to be free to be herself, not the person other people wanted her to be. She never permitted her fear to destroy her own sense of compassion and mercy. Like me, she never stopped looking for love.
These values overcome the fear that had paralyzed her, and I must confess the same thing happened to me.
When fear overcomes our ambitions, values and choices, we literally lose our life, emotionally and spiritually, if not physically. I am aware that my values must always supersede my fear.
Most destructive of all, fear smothers love – the will to pursue it, the vision to maintain it. Love is our real work, our true destiny. We cannot find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another being.
I do not need to understand precisely what is happening or why, or to foresee the future. What I need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered me today, in the present moment, this very minute, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Those are my values, and if I keep them close to my heart and soul, they will conquer the fear that lurks like some evil spirit in me and in all of us, and lead me to a life of love and meaning.
“If you want to identify me,” wrote Merton, “ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
