I.41 — Loosening Fear

Fear is usually not looking at what is actually in front of you. It is running a rehearsal of the worst version of what might be in front of you later, and gripping that rehearsal as though running it enough times were a form of protection, as though the bad outcome will hurt less, or become less likely, for having been imagined in advance a hundred times.

It will not. The rehearsal changes nothing about tomorrow. What it changes is today, which gets spent bracing against a version of events that has not happened and, most of the time, will not happen in the shape it is being rehearsed.

Look directly at the rehearsal itself, the way you would look at any other grip: where it sits, what it is telling you, what it is trying to protect. Seen clearly, most rehearsals lose their claim to authority fairly fast. They turn out to be a loop, not a warning.

This has to be done carefully, because fear is sometimes right. Loosening is not a claim that the danger is imaginary or that caution is a mistake. It is aimed only at the grip, the endless rehearsal, not at the forecast underneath it. If there is a real thing to prepare for, prepare for it once, plainly, and then notice whether the second rehearsal is doing anything the first one did not.