How Our Fears and Limitations Prevent Us From Reaching Our Potential
“Fear is the barrier that determines whether we will move further into or retreat away from the intimidating unknown in every encounter. Fear is what interrupts our ability to act on our developing ideals and the test of our devotion to our principles.”
Reality is composed entirely of experiences the mind either has the requisite familiarity to manage or experiences still new enough to overwhelm it. All information a human being is capable of adopting is part of either known or unknown schemas for appropriate interaction. At all times, all people are in a battle to manage the possible chaos of their experience, attempting to turn the tide toward the favor of their comfort. It is their predominantly felt emotions that do the major part of determining how this battle will play out for them.
Fear is an emotional tool, like any other, that has evolved to aid in comfort and survival, to prevent an excess of the unknown and potentially harmful from overwhelming a mind before it is ready to adapt. Fear is the reminder of boundaries not yet crossed. It defends against irreversible error by reminding each person what he cannot do and preventing him from moving where he is not ready to. Fear is natural, preemptive protection from what may cause harm. It is the pressure to stick with what one knows, regardless of curiosity or ambition.
I realized long ago that how I approached the unmanageable determined the long-term trajectory of my exploration. So long as I felt that I was in control, the unknown instigated a curious and interested response in me. When exploration came too quickly, however, it created an overwhelming sense of fear and caution in me. My emotions signaled emergency, even where there might have been none. My mind might not know what to do, only that it is not prepared to do it. So, it must either prepare for everything simultaneously or flee so that it requires no preparation at all.
Fear stems from the awareness of the possibility that the unknown may be unfavorable. Curiosity, its opposite, rests in the hope that the unknown might carry positive changes from which its host can grow. These are the forces at work in everyone to determine how to respond to one’s own ignorance, and appropriate responses are always necessary because ignorance is unending. Fear, applied appropriately, keeps a person safe from what may harm him, but too much of it is the antagonist to progress.
While we are still growing, we don’t yet know reality’s inherent limitations or our own. Each generation learns them anew as it rises up in the world, facing distinct challenges in the context of its present era. But we must be ready to analyze on our own terms what is true and valid about whatever novelty we instantly fear. To always back away from what the world has not prepared us to handle is to guarantee that we will always be subject to the same limitations as it, and it will never be congruent with our nature.
In the early stage of life, our caretakers feared more for us than we did for ourselves. They acquired awareness of key non-instinctual dangers through their personal experience. Without the guidance of their influence to limit our exploration, we would almost certainly stumble into problems we had no faculty to manage, and those problems could seriously harm us. Rampant exploration would swiftly be our end. Instead, because of those instilled fears, we suffered only relatively minor injuries and learned important lessons when we tackled more than we were ready for. But now, the burden of maturity is to set our own temperaments and boundaries because we recognize the old external ones are no longer relevant.
The deepest pains will eventually be seen as bittersweet because you will know they play vital roles in helping you remember the areas of reality you have been reluctant to explore until now.
More than that, inappropriate fears actively sabotage the primary mechanism of our exceptional expansion and adventure. Fear, when it grows out of our control, spoils our lust for new experience, including those new experiences which would have led to our biggest trials and most critical moral identity lessons. If we are too cautious, we deny all the possible benefits of the infinite unexplored. Our curiosity withers as the unfamiliar looms ever larger in our consciousness. The familiar then crystalizes, permanently narrowing our field of awareness.
We emerge from shelters constructed by familiar parties into vast and unknown territories. Whatever inherited pains we carry, even though we may have never directly experienced them ourselves, still serve to curtail our behavior. How far will we go to replace the effects of adopted experience with ones we generate firsthand? Must we undertake the effort to do this with literally everything the world told us to avoid before we can be sure what the best ways for us to live will be? Essentially, what we must do now is determined by our own metrics the level of injury that is useful for the purposes of living within our limits and abilities.
The first task is to distinguish between the fear that harms and the fear that protects.
How does your past experience affect you here in the present? Can you tell what rational fears are there to defend you? You cannot know that your truths are objective or that your meaning is perfect without experimentation, and experimentation requires playing in the unknown. Stay, for a while, with the discomforts that arise when you picture something personally frightening. If you wait long enough, not immediately running from the sirens that go off inside you at the perception of dangers, your fear might quickly cease to matter. If so, you will eliminate the faulty barrier that hypersensitivity placed inside you and gain the ability to venture where before you never could.
Once you understand how any given fear works inside you, you gain the power to master it.
You can then prepare for the foreseeable instances where a known fear might overtake and disable you. So, simulate its effects ahead of time. Will yourself into extreme states of panic or despair, imagining as vividly as you can how the worst of all conceivable situations might harm you. Via prolonged exposure in the mind, can you develop a practical resistance to what harms you? Can you become a more capable actor in the world with a broader range of possible functions?
Old fears need not remain obstacles once you realize their obsolescence.
They can be your doorway to parts of yourself not yet revealed. Whatever is hurting you now may actually evolve to aid you. The deepest pains will eventually be seen as bittersweet because you will know they play vital roles in helping you remember the areas of reality you have been reluctant to explore until now. The stresses you endure are, therefore, a tremendously valuable type of suffering, so long as you can recover from the damage that they inflict to your psyche. In time, the rightful fears will still be there to protect you, while the illusory ones will fade to nothing.
