I feel so many of us spend lifetimes fearing to look carefully in certain places. We fear what we might find. We know something is there, but we never spend the time to put a spotlight on it, to see if it is good or bad, to see if it is just stuck, and keeping some larger wheel from coming to life and contributing to our well being.
Fear, I think it can be accurately stipulated, underlies all cognitive, affective, and behavioral rigidities. People keep fear, though, because doing the work of finding out what lies in that dark corner amplifies the fear EVERY TIME. You look that way, introspectively, and the anxiety increases. You look away, and the anxiety decreases, but never disappears. You have to go in that corner to make it go away, to heal.
I get overwhelmed often. I think big. Nobody has my back, not really, and perhaps that is the way it always is, when you are trying to see the world with your own eyes.
But increasingly I feel that if I follow the stream of fear, that is where salvation is. That is where joy and beauty are hiding. It is a hard, hard path, and it is small wonder most people never even contemplate it, as far as I can tell, outside of some massive life event that makes some emotional shifts impossible to avoid.
But that is where life is, at the end of what you fear most.