Faux Fear

One thing that we live with everyday, like it or not, is-

fear.

Fear is something that few of us have trained ourselves to live without. It wakes us up in the morning and it goes to bed with us at night. Of the many things that scare us—physical violence, death, being separated from people we love, losing control, failure, rejection, losing our job, looking bad or making a mistake—few are even really real. There are actually two kinds of fear, as far as I know: the authentic real and useful fear that we experience when we are afraid of something that can actually harm us, and the other kind, the inauthentic fraudulent kind, otherwise known as:

The counterfeit kind of fear.

What are we so afraid of? And, is the thing that we are really so afraid of, really even real?

When I was six years old and in Mrs. Feldman's first grade class, I decided one day, at recess, to muster up the courage to conquer the monkey bar in the middle of the playground. Even though it loomed over me like Mount Everest, and even though it was huge and definitely scraping the sky, I knew that to climb it successfully and return to earth to tell about it was definitely a rite of passage at my school.

So, I took a deep breath and up I went—one step at a time, one hand on top of the other until I reached the top. When I grabbed the pole that was there so that you could slide back down to earth, I could not move. There I was, higher than I had ever been in my whole life and now I was just stuck. I closed my eyes and I prayed for God to send me a rescue team.

The recess bell rang, which left me there, stranded at the top of Mt. Everest with the entire first grade looking at me, confused. The fact that I could not open my eyes and the fact that I would not come down and get in line to go back inside just did not make sense. But it made sense to me. I was afraid.