Everything is here for at least one reason. Everything happens for at least one reason. Sometimes, the reason can take a while to show itself. And sometimes, we’re so busy focusing on other things - our ‘priorities’, that we can miss the subtle moments of learning that reveal themselves each day. Finally last week, after 38 years of torture, I overcame my biggest lifelong fear. And it took a woman to show me the way. She was an incredible woman. She had unforgettable legs. They went all the way up… all eight of them.
Fear is a powerful thing. It brims with energy, it transforms us in a blink, it sets us alight and triggers our radar at full tilt. And few things ignite- and energise us more than our desire to run, hide, self-preserve and close ourselves down. So what if… instead of allowing fear to use our energy to shut us down, we used it to make us quickly grow?
How many things have we been scared of over the years? The bogeyman… barking dogs… the monsters in Doctor Who… ‘Chuckie’-type dolls and clowns… heights… wasps… snakes… trigonometry? And what threat did any of these things actually pose? What harm could they ever really have done us? There’s an expression in English – irrational fear – this implies there isn’t a logical explanation for the fear. Threat is a question of perception, but fear is never irrational. We always have a logic behind our fears, but our logics are like our languages… each person’s functions differently, and we need to learn it to understand it. But what is the opportunity in fear?
Imagine for a second. You’re three years old. You’re in bed, drifting off to sleep. When all of a sudden, this huge monster-thing you’ve never seen before comes out of nowhere and runs across your legs. You scream out loud, shout for your mum, she runs up the stairs, removes it, strokes your head and tells you not to worry - it was only a ‘spider’.
“Spider”… “Spider”… “Spider”. Even at an early age, some words, you couldn’t forget if you tried. I didn’t sleep that night. And during the childhood years, each and every time I saw a spider, my heart would race, my mind would accelerate, I’d run, scream and then I’d freeze. No matter what, the spider needed to go. I would do anything for the person who got rid of it. Spider-removal became like a black-market commodity, like a drug, some sort of addiction… something I’d do anything for.
Yet all the time, you knew it was ridiculous. Your head knew the spider didn’t mean any harm and couldn’t harm you if it tried. You knew that it was more terrified of you – at 3000 times its size – than you should ever be of it. But your head wasn’t in control… your fear-instinct was. You hated your fear, you knew it was holding you back, you knew it wasn’t right. But you also knew that in those moments, you are more alert, aware and responsive than at any other time. What if you could feel like this whenever you wanted, just for all the right reasons?
As the adult years arrived and began to move swiftly by, I loved having a go at the ‘fears’, ‘scary things’ and the ‘impossibles’. My career started in Officer Training with the British Military. I’d been awarded a few scholarships by the RAF while still at school and what had driven me to apply was the realisation that they would be impossible to get. But I got them. I accidentally destroyed (oops) a military aircraft one day then climbed aboard another the very next day to address any fear. While a student and working at a luxury campsite in France, I one day had to calm down an elderly Dutch lady by catching a snake with my bare hands next to her caravan. I was terrified of snakes. But so was she. And no sooner had I caught it that she told me she would only be able to sleep if I cut its head off with the lady’s own breadknife. How on earth would I handle this? It took me 25 minutes pretending to kill that snake before I disappeared with it in a bag, with me shaking and truly terrified. Address the fear. When after university, I applied for jobs that wanted mother-tongue German speakers (I’m British), I knew they’d be impossible to get, so I applied. And I got them. And I gave up my early career to investigate MI6 and Austria. Everybody told me it was impossible. So I did my best. And it went well. Address the impossible. Address the fear.
‘Fears’ and ‘impossibles’ are something I’ve always loved. So what on earth was different about spiders?
It was last week that I found the answer. It was a huge spider that showed me the way. And my wife who’s expecting our first child in the month ahead.
“Jonathan!” came the shout. Was the baby coming? Was something wrong? When I got upstairs, everything was ok. But my wife was pointing and stressed. She’d found a spider. A huge one. Huge. She was terrified. And it was a seriously fast mover.
It was big. My stomach turned over the way it has for 38 years. But then I looked around. My wife was terrified. The spider was terrified. Would this be showing our baby how to be terrified too? Is that what we want? What do we want this energy to do for us? And as I looked, I wondered why so many of us would hit this little thing with a shoe. We human beings need to move away from destroying things we don’t like. And all of a sudden, without seeing it coming, I had immediate access to all the memories and moments throughout my life when a spider had suddenly arrived. The countries I’d lived in, the friends I’d known, the places where I’d belonged, the smells, the faces, the memories.
And then it dawned on me. This fear wasn’t about the spider. This fear I’d had my whole life was simply about me needing privacy. To be able to remember and enjoy the moments of my own life in a special way from time to time by freezing out the present. Fear provided true privacy. And I’d simply been using the spider.
For the first time in my life, I picked up this terrified huge tiny thing, opened the window, let it out safely so that it didn’t get hurt, then I smiled. I wanted our baby to feel the energy created when her daddy protects tiny things that are scared. And I wanted to remove the assumption that fear is followed by destruction. And when fear arises in the future, where possible, I want to now immediately sense its opportunities, not its limiting assumptions.
Hungry lions hurt. So do cars that hit us at speed. And falling off a tall bridge hurts too. Some fears are understandable… threat is out there. But how many of our fears, nervousness and worries actually pose no threat whatsoever? How much of our worrying is actually attention-seeking?
How many of the things we’re scared of or worried about create an energetic reaction that’s difficult to explain? When we choose to experience- then use fear-energy differently, our life turns a corner. When we choose to grow and be bigger, fear feels different. It fires us up with a sense of opportunity to behave beyond our past. When instead of thinking about it too much, instead of repeating the way we behaved when we were 3, we choose to challenge ourselves by not thinking anymore, not worrying anymore, not pausing anymore, but instead just doing it – picking up the huge spider – our roles change. We start to sense opportunity everywhere. And the ripple this creates flows across our whole life. So this week, take a moment to challenge yourself to enjoy some fear. Go and find something scary. If you're initially hesitant, connect with how you’ll feel once you’ve done it. Scare yourself. Then enjoy how much better life will permanently feel from then on knowing you've moved on.
(p.s. The spider world wanted to thank me for our newly-signed peace treaty. By way of thanks, the Ambassador below popped in to say hello just this morning. We shook hands and I measured him. 13cms. I'm serious. Thank GOD the fear has gone.)
:-) Jonathan
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