Choosing fear........................

I have mentioned before how much my families willingness to run on a relay team beside me while I completed my marathon meant to me. For some silly reason they love para sailing like I love running and wanted to share the joy with me. Did I mention that I am not a fan of heights?

Being the loving, giving person I am I couldn't deny their request after what they had done for me. In other words, I was going as a way of cancelling my debt. "I go up in the air, consider yourself paid in full" was more like how it came across to them. Regardless I agreed and we piled into the boat along with two other couples.

I insisted on being first, knowing if I watched anyone else do it I would not be able to go through with my plans. The tears began as we pulled away from the dock, and my last words to the guy as he told me to sit down and relax was, "take me up for thirty seconds and then get me down."

Apparently he thought I was joking...

As the wind caught my sail and I went up and off the boat I gave in to the complete and utter terror of the situation. It was almost as if I were having an out of body experience because one part of my mind was watching myself hanging high over the ocean, eyes squeezed tightly shut so as not to see how high, hands gripping the ropes, tears streaming, screaming at the top of my lungs, "I want to come down" while at the same time thinking, "What is wrong with you silly girl? Do you really think they would do this if it wasn't safe?"

And still I choose to let the fear envelope me, swallow me, and penetrate every fiber of my being. I ended up having exactly the experience I wanted to have, maybe needed to have.

Of course nothing physical happen to me, eventually the boat got me low enough that the others heard my screams and my ride mercifully ended. Poor Mister all he could do was hold me and repeat over and over that he was very proud of me and I never had to do it again. How right he is about that!

Since that afternoon I have been using that experience as a way of working on the expanded notion that I/we choose how we react to every life circumstances. It is very clear to me that I deliberately stayed in the fear of the moment when I could have talked myself right through it and enjoyed the ride as much as the rest of the participants did. I think, at the time, I was more interested in proving that I could do something for someone else that I had no desire to do more than I was interested in sharing the experience with them. Why in the world would I think this makes me more noble, possibly even superior? SO NOT the case!

When we left for home there was a pretty big wind storm going on, making for a rocky take-off and much turbulence and yet I wasn't the least bit frightened. Isn't that interesting? This fact simply supports my idea that I chose to not be afraid in the airplane just as I chose to wallow in fear a couple of days before.

The moral of this story?

The first step in conquering our fears is to face them. Introduce yourself to your fear and then ask the fear what it has to teach you about yourself and about life. Only then can you make an informed choice of whether or not to embrace and stay in the fear to learn that lesson, or move on through it to learn a different one.