I see life as like being attacked by a bear. You can run, you can pretend to be dead, or you can make yourself bigger.
Tag: fear
Doubt is what drives me, the nervousness that I don’t have it anymore. There’s nothing a coach or anyone can say to me that’s more powerful than my own fear that I can’t do it anymore.
Never attribute to something other than fear that which can be attributed to fear.
Marshall’s Razor, coined by Colin Marshall. Filed under: fear.
Fear and defensiveness, the architects of so many of our lowest moments.
Why You Never Truly Leave High School — New York Magazine
It was a really small study. I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into it. But its results sum up the entire high-school experience, in my view: mistaking people’s fear for something else.
Reminds me of Mark Oppenheimer on running:
Like adolescents, distance runners have rivalries only with themselves.
I got through high school relatively unscathed, I think, but I think it was probably dumb luck.
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’?
Lady Macbeth, suggesting you be less of a wimp. Cf. Seneca:
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord let me suffer much
and then dieLet me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fearMake the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as beforeLet the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in itso that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his loveMake the day rise brightly
as if there were no more painAnd let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee’s head
Anna Kemienska’s poem from The Book of Luminous Things, translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Via malevichsquare.
Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.
He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow. For what new pleasure is there that any hour can now bring? They are all known, all have been enjoyed to the full.
Seneca is my new jam.
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Since money always promises something other than itself–it is only, as we say, worth what it can buy–it seems to protect us, as promises do, from the fear of there being nothing and no one that we want.
Adam Phillips. I think I’ll post a couple more from his very good Going Sane later.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
John Muir on Yosemite. (via)
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
John Muir on Yosemite. (via)
Terror management theory – Wikipedia
“A theory within psychology that focuses on the implicit emotional reactions of people that occur when confronted with the psychological terror of knowing we will eventually die.”
Wehr in the World: Controlling your emotions
The important point is this: Evolution seems to have favored inaction over action. E.g., don’t get too close to those people — they might be dangerous! Don’t do that — they might laugh at me! Our limbic system — the emotional center responsible for an embarrassingly high percentage of our behavior — has yet to learn that in the industrial age with market economies and unprecedented levels of absolute wealth, people aren’t so dangerous.
Mark Larson 