These are my musings and observations on my daily life, loves and the laughter that are all a part of my experience of living now in the shires of England.

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Fear and helplessness

Fear is personal. My fear is not your fear … it may be similar but it’s never quite the same.

Fear is changeable. What makes me afraid on one day may be a walk in the park another day.

Fear is terrifying.

When you love someone you experience a whole new level of fear. Especially if the loved one is in danger – be it real or imagined. This fear is laced with helplessness.

The situation could be an illness. The details could be unknown. That’s enough to awaken the monstrosity of fear. Fear grows with alacrity; it comes from nowhere and is suddenly everywhere.

At times like this you don’t know what to do but you want to do everything and anything.

At times like this all previous personal fears are overshadowed.

No horror film could touch the magnitude that you feel on the scared-scale; it’s off all records.

That person who has elicited this feeling of love in you is in a situation you can’t control and that is like having your hands bound in a straight-jacket, locked underwater in a barrel with a mask on and no air to breathe. Every ounce, gram, centimetre of your being wants to do something but you are incapacitated and totally helpless. The combination of anxiety and powerlessness renders you motionless.

It is at this point that hope takes over.

Hope does not weight anything.

Hope does not have a shape or size.

Hope has the keys to unlock the worry and clear the vision.

Hope enables you to look forward and see a future.

Hope lets you smile when your heart is breaking.

Hope gives you the power to move when your body has given up.

Hope is the strongest muscle in your mind.

Hope reduces fear until it is destroyed.

Hope is the partner of love.

1 comment:

P.D. Gourlais said...

Hi Marj,
I read this and totally relate to this level of fear. I always tell my mother that women with a strong fear instinct are bound to keep their offspring alive. We do have anxiety for a reason but if it gets to the point of tipping over our rationality, then it needs to be handled. I thought so much of this poem and hope that you'll share with me a walk down memory lane with a poem about Hope! Cheers! Keep writing! Peedee

Hope by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

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