Fear as Part of Life: What to Do So It Doesn't Swallow You Whole

#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation

Expectations

A person comes up with and tells himself: in order to shoot a good video, podcast, or photo, you need to use, for example, either a quality camera or a good microphone or the right space. He prepares for this in life. For a good life from the family’s point of view, you need to choose the right wife. He has certain ideas about how things should be. For example, a good business is the one you definitely enjoy or the one that brings in a lot of money. He has certain ideas, and he prepares for them. And when expectations don't match reality, it leads to absolute horror and stress. This happens because he’s afraid of helplessness, not understanding what’s going to happen.

Uncertainty and Confusion

A person has two very large parallel fears inside: one is the fear of the unknown, of what lies ahead; the second, which comes from that unknown, is confusion (am I doing this right or wrong?). Fear of the unknown arises as a consequence of trying to establish some kind of order in life. The fear of the unknown is not the primary cause; it happens because the person wants to establish some order in life: for instance, to have something certain (business, family, space). Then, when things don’t go as planned, fear of the unknown sets in: he doesn’t understand what he’ll do next.

Do I have fear? Absolutely, yes. For example, I’ve planned to shoot a certain number of videos, to release them according to a strict schedule. I have big trips ahead to Europe, Austria, Italy, Dubai, the UAE, Turkey, so I need to plan the content. We start prepping for the shoot, and then external noise starts—someone mowing the lawn, or something else happens. Even though we seem completely isolated. We can’t shoot, and time’s ticking away: 30 minutes, an hour, two, three hours gone, and my mind doesn’t understand what’s going to happen if we don’t film. Because if we don’t, the release schedule gets messed up. Not just that, but I won’t be able to catch up due to my travel. This fear builds inside me as a result of uncertainty. And I want to control everything.

So, when someone asks how I deal with this and what I do, the first thing I do is observe myself from the outside and try to look objectively at how I should handle the situation.

When we talk about fear, we’re talking about something that put us in a state of uncertainty—it’s the source of the fear and anxiety about not knowing how to move forward. Fear inside the body starts to destroy everything. What does "destroy" mean? When you’re afraid, you can’t make good decisions. I’m not talking about a healthy fear, like when you see a tiger and get scared, and your system kicks in to protect you, thanks to your body’s natural physiological processes. But I’m talking about something else.

Imagine, fear kicks in, and I take a step back from myself and look at what’s really happening: Do I really need to know what’s going to happen next? I immediately tell myself that I actually don’t need to know.

The truth is, things will happen as they should, because there are endless ways situations can unfold.

And it’s definitely not the end of the world if I can’t film a few videos. Sure, it might affect my financial outcome, my workload, and other aspects of my life and the lives of others, like the teams who are waiting for the videos for editing, writing articles, and storytelling. Teams are ready to post the content, it’s a whole sequence of events involving many people, not just me. I realize this, and the fear grows even more. And if I can’t step away from myself and look at the situation from a distance, I won’t be able to deal with the fear.

It’s easy to say that fear is helpful, that it helps us stay focused.

Fear Is the Result, Not the Cause

But the thing is, fear is the result, not the cause.

That’s really important to understand. If I don’t live in a state of forecasting and planning everything, which are some of the main reasons for fear, then the fear tied to this cause won’t exist. If I live with trust that whatever is ahead will unfold as it should, fear won’t arise because it has no reason to. Moreover, if I stop planning the future so precisely and stop thinking I know exactly how my life will go—how many kids I’ll have, which university they’ll attend, how they’ll finish school, what my relationships will be like with family, friends, colleagues, where I’ll live and work—then fear won’t exist. I’m creating some illusion of the future—knowing, wanting, dreaming. I feel like I need that planning. In other words, I’m not ready to live calmly accepting that things will happen as they will, and that’s where fear comes from.

Layering on top of that fear is another projection of fear: are the things I’m doing right now right or wrong? Should I be doing this or not? For example, let’s go back to the video situation. I start shooting a video and think: if I’m feeling fear right now, am I projecting this fear onto others through the content I’m creating? Should I even be making this video? I start to worry about whether I’m making the right decision, all because there was some other underlying cause. It’s very difficult to break free from this. It’s a crazy, endless, and really tough struggle because fear eats away and tears you apart from the inside.

“Basic” Fears

There are fears that are inherently present in our lives, they’re natural, and most people won’t overcome them. For example, the fear of death. There are fears that arise at the physical level, which are hard to overcome. Like the fear of public speaking: when you step onto a stage in front of 10,000 people. You need to gradually train your body for that. Another question is, do you even need to do that or not? Should you fight the fear of death or should you understand how life works and how it flows? Or should you understand how life works and how it flows? And come to trust that every life ends, including death. We all know this; it’s such a simple thing. Every life ends, including death. There’s no need to fight the fear of death, just observe its origin. And moreover, no one is going to come up with a system to make our bodies accustomed to dying. For example, trying to die 50 times, hovering at the edge, at the brink, and at some point it’ll become easy. Like with public speaking, they usually say: “Speak for 300, 500 hours, and it’ll become easy.” That’s not a healthy solution, that’s a struggle. Not everyone fights to overcome some challenge. Not everyone.

Discipline

Someone asked me a question about discipline. It was about how to put yourself into a state of discipline and how much it influences the final result.

When I look at my own discipline, I understand that I was born with it: with some inner strength that allows me to go through a lot of growth, a lot of events, calmly and without difficulty. I didn’t fight to go to bed at 9 p.m. instead of 3 a.m. I don’t fight to make my days even. I’ve always easily gotten up in the morning. I don’t fight to love getting up early and working hard all day long.

I can actually say the opposite, that I’ve fought to not work as much. So, there’s some inner strength that allows me to do this, but on the other hand, there are things I can’t do and I have to go through a struggle. For example, working out every day. That’s definitely a struggle for me; I don’t have the ease and freedom with that. Just because I can easily go to bed and get up every day and easily work a lot doesn’t mean I’m not working or putting in effort. It means I have enough strength to do this without a fight.

When we talk about real struggle, hardship—it means I don’t have the strength to do it calmly and easily.

No matter how many times I say it, people don’t hear it, it’s really hard to hear because that inner voice doesn’t want to accept it. It doesn’t want to accept that it’s simply a lack of strength. But that’s actually a good, healthy way to look at things, to see the causes of certain events.

In this case, we’re talking about fear, acknowledging the real cause and effect and our own powerlessness in the face of fear, so we don’t have to fight it.

Trust Life

Powerlessness, that you can't plan your whole life.

But there’s an incredible miracle in that: why should I even know my whole life? Plan it? Why do I need that? After all, we’re talking about how if a person lives in a state of trust towards life and the moments that happen, they won't face certain types of difficult events. Right now, I’m talking about certain difficult events, because trusting life doesn’t mean that you can’t die tomorrow, break a leg, or that everything will be fine in terms of health, family, relationships, partnerships, money, that you’ll develop, grow.

Trusting life means being ready to trust that things will flow in some way, trust that you don’t control a huge number of things, trust that when good or bad things happen, they have their own reasons, and we often don’t know them.

And under no circumstances at this moment should you say: “But what about human freedom, when I have the ability to take some action and make some decision?” No one is taking away your freedom at that moment, you are actually getting closer to it.

Freedom is definitely not in planning, but in the life each of us lives.