LOVE AND FEAR

Love and fear are the opposite ends of the scale of emotions that bounds human life.  You could call these ends open and closed or expansion and contraction. You could call them pleasure and pain or joy and despair.  You could call them heaven and hell.  You could call them life and death.

Our lives are lived at different points along that continuum.  We can shift our position on the scale, but, being creatures of habit, we commonly gravitate toward a spot on the scale that becomes our comfort zone.  We can hover at the top of the range at joy, passion, enthusiasm, at the bottom of the range at fear, depression, despair or somewhere in the middle at pessimism, frustration, disappointment.

Our habitual territory on the scale, our comfort zone, determines our experience of life.  Some people feel a lot of anxiety if they are not miserable so a happy experience that they have accidentally let in will have to be promptly squelched.  It’s too uncomfortable and threatening.  They fear that something really terrible will happen to them if they dare to feel too much pleasure or if they dare to hope for anything better than their usual flavor.  You have probably met people like this.  Maybe you are one of them yourself.  It’s a popular stance in our culture, a kind of world-weariness that passes for sophistication and wisdom.  There is a lot of it going around.

Just remember that it’s a choice.  You can be “cool”, miserable and self-defeating or you can reach for the stars and be joyful, loving and enthusiastic.  It starts in the privacy of your own mind so no one has to know about it.  Then, when good things start showing up in your life, people who notice will just think that you are “lucky”.  You never have to fess up to being a positive attractor of good things.  It can just be your little secret.