Whether you are several awards holding Derek Sanderson Jeter who is running his final lap in American Major League Baseball (MLB) for the New York Yankees and whose sterling career has him leaving as a five-time World Series champion and the Yankees' all-time career leader in games played, hits, stolen bases, and bats or you are part of the Indian Space Research Organization's(ISRO’s ) historic Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM); groundbreaking revolutionary ventures and lives involve risk and fear, both of which are overcome because of a cause and purpose and drive and end grander than the two(i.e risk and fear). Ambrose Redmoon captures this timeless truth beautifully: "Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all."
The very reason why the quest for fearlessness might be foolish is that fear in a way is essential for growing and living. There is a kind of fearlessness thrust onto people sometimes involuntarily which causes them to jump from tall buildings, take their own lives from nooses, and lie on rail tracks with oncoming trains; a fearlessness which many times shares a boundary with a rabid tiresome fearfulness. That boundary may symbolize the point where the individual becomes tired of being fearful and takes the plunging leap into a blinding fearlessness loaded with potential to stifle growth and steal lives. Fear is a part of our living and it is fear which triggers that extra speed you never knew existed when you are being chased by a stray hungry lioness; it is the fear of not meeting a deadline which unleashes that never before known genius just in time to save the day; it is the fear of mediocrity and not living up to ones fullest potential which is the shot in the arm, nudging you to go the extra mile, think an extra thought and stay an extra hour so that you can begin to scratch the surface of the fully blooming you. I am not referring here to the kind of paranoid fear of fear or just plain fear which paralyzes action, suffocates loving trust, courts inactivity and triggers that kind of caution which has condemned many to lives never really lived.
To walk a path never before walked, to grope in space never before explored, to venture into areas never before embraced, to engage the kind of revolutionary change which leaves a mark and advances the world for ever, a fright might ricochet down your spine as you take the necessary risks and first steps of that daunting path, but you need to realize there is something at stake way more important than that fear itself. Through an informed realization you must give yourself permission to be free from the fear of fear, to realize that great feats were not achieved in the absence of fear but through an overcoming of fear rooted in a cause bigger than ourselves. We must learn to embrace and tap into our fears and channel them towards a never ending better which fully celebrates the best we can be. Become a rising star!
© September 2014 afesehngwaHilary
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