i'm scared of fear

fear.

i'm afraid of it.

the very thought of it scares me. it scares me in a way that wakes me up in the middle of the night...like those dreams when you're falling and you can't wake up until the very last minute, right before you smash every bone in your body.
the kind of dream where you're being chased and you can't seem to wake yourself up, although you know you're dreaming...yeah, one of those kinds of scared.

i'm scared of fear in a way that would put the Boogie Man on unemployment and cause Monsters Inc. to growl it's way to Capitol Hill and beg for a bailout.

it's not that i'm super-brave, or super-dumb for that matter. not in the least. some amount of NATURAL, REFLEXIVE fear is a large part of what makes the human being a very smart animal. if it weren't for some degree of fear, dumbass pedestrians would be walking into oncoming traffic while texting/tweeting/google mapping oblivious to the dumbass driver texting/tweeting/google mapping while driving, motoring down the way, ignorant to the cluster-f*ck waiting to happen.
neither dumbass equipped with the internal device we call "intuition" or in nerd-talk "spidey-sense".

that's not the type of fear i'm talkin' about. that's the GOOD fear.
that's the kind of fear that allows us to not fall for the "your relative died and left you a million dollars...all you need to email us back is your social security number, date of birth a scanned copy of your drivers license and two check stubs" email.

the type of fear that i'm afraid of is the one we've all been buying into over the course of our lives.
the one that mysteriously shows up in our psyches one day,like FICA and Aflac and all that other crap we don't remember signing up for when we first started at the new job yet, there it is,on our checks as a big fat "whereinthehelldidmymoneygoandwhointhehellisFICA!?!??!!!!" flag.

i'm scared of the fear that creeps up on us and locks us in to complacency.

we have no idea how and when we became such cowards.

when we were little we'd climb trees to the top, jump down flights of stairs, swing as high as we could on the swing set and jump at the apex.

now, we're too scared to get the mail.

inside we stay, safely locked away, self inflicted prison sentences of life in fear.


at some point, we have to live knowing that shit happens while not being held hostage to that fact.

we have to take risks and chances and know that if we aren't dead, we'll be ok.
we have to "find a way or make one", if i may borrow from Clark Atlanta University's motto.

if we don't, then what would our lives be worth?

what will we have lived for?

i'm planning on taking a leap of faith very soon.

stay tuned and watch me fly...