I’m sure you have heard those words bandied around before, perhaps from a philosophical teacher or parent, or a trite and overenthusiastic personal development devotee.

Before I go on, let me just pre frame the content to follow.

You could say that last year has been a bit of a desert year in many ways, with seemlingly everything reflecting the barren, arid nature of the driest places on earth. With 2010 here upon us, we see a glorious shimmering oasis’ on the horizon and can hear the rushing sounds of water in the distance. Parched and thirsty, I am hoping that it is not a mirage.

Whilst in this desert, I relied upon a belief, a skill almost, where it seems that I truely believe that I will land on my feet and everything will be ok. No matter how messed up everything gets, no matter how dangerous or how threatening, I am at my best when things are at there worst.

I think that those sort of beliefs are pretty cool beliefs to have. They are empowering and they are unrestrictive.

Except….

Ok, so, even if you own the Lancer Evo VIII MR FQ-340 of belief systems, you still have the flaws that every human being possess: blind spots.

From your normal view point of reality, you cannot see what are the blind spots of your belief systems. You are looking through the polarised windows of your beliefs and values, thinking that a cursory glance into the rear-view mirror of your past experience is enough to validate your view of the world.

(As a side note, we have all seen the horrific accidents that are waiting to happen for those who are stuck looking in that mirror too.)

My beliefs of “everything will be ok”, “I am at my best when everything is worst” and “I will land on my feet”… They are great… But only if they are accompanied by taking right action and checking your blind spots.

Do you know what my beliefs were hiding? You might be able to guess from the title of this post.

Lots of fear and lots of habits of dependence.

Now, I have dealt with my dependence stuff a long while ago, but it is pretty clear that the situations that forged those dependencies played a hand in forming the beliefs that have stayed with me.

But the fear…

Let me say that I never once felt it. I felt that maybe I should be scared, especially having had a couple of very close brushes with death, but I never felt that I lived in fear. Don’t get me wrong, I could see how fear could be effecting me, but since I couldn’t feel it, I thought it wasn’t doing so.

Maybe I am just a slow learner with this one, but it takes either a major accident or a near miss to really learn where the blind spots are in your current belief systems. Even if someone points them out, the nature of deeply embedded beliefs are self-defending, so one of the only ways to REALLY learn is to have them be compromised by force.

In my case, I needed about 3,943,771 near misses. Or it feels like it did.

Let me posit something: fear is good. In fact, it is downright great.

Fear lets me know when to run away from or disarm a threatening person. Fear lets me know to smack a shark repeatedly in the nose (yeah, happens alllll the time). Fear lets me know to keep my feet and to be on guard.

The two big problems with fear are that:

1. It can totally paralyse you – the rabbit in the headlights effect.
2. There seems little control over it.

Both of these can be overcome quite easily. The first can be dealt with by doing some fear response training. The second can be learned via emotional control techniques.

My problem was that I was experiencing the first in parts of my life, but since I couldn’t feel the fear, I could not control it. I didn’t even identify it as fear!

The quote, attributed to Ambrose Redmoon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and about six zillion others is this:

“Courage is not the absense of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear”

I have awoke this morning after some very weird dreams. I am afraid. Quite seriously, I haven’t felt this way in decades.

And as perverse as it may sound, I love it. I’ll explain why later, but for now, lets just say that fear is letting me know that if I want my desires, I need to run my dehydrated spirit towards that oasis’ as fast as possible.

Because if I don’t, I won’t even get to find out if it is an illusion.