[Tension & Renewal - XIX]
What’s your greatest fear? Public speaking or drowning? Never finding love, poverty, losing a job, etc? Is it meaninglessness?
The more people I meet that are liberated from their (former) fears because they faced them, the more I realized the greatest fear rarely makes it on people’s list. We’re mostly blind to it.
It’s not spiders or rattlesnakes, poverty or homelessness, public speaking or singing. The greatest fear is not really a “thing” at all but a “location.”
Right at the edge of feeling your fear—and the whole spectrum of feelings that accompany that fear—is a place of ultimate torment. If you think of fear as a cliff where you fall into the darkness of lacking control, the scariest place is where your toes hang over the edge looking at the abyss.
It’s not the abyss but the staring at the abyss that drives people mad and drives them away. We spend our whole lives avoiding the edge because we believe the lie that if we step up to it (And eventually off of it) we will be destroyed.
Spiritual renewal happens on the edge. At the scariest place, facing the darkness, ready to take on the lie.
