Teach fear to heel

“We invent what we love, and what we fear.” – John Irving

A student of mine was murdered this week, on Wednesday.

No, she was actually assassinated as she prayed at a Buddhist monastery in northern Thailand. The reports are that masked gunmen in black leapt from a van and shot her in the neck, then turned to shoot her husband. Thai police have said they believe the couple was targeted for assassination by the Laotian government under a belief they were working against the communist regime in neighboring Laos.

I had met at lunch the day before with another professor to finalize plans for this student’s independent study on global leadership this semester. Thankfully, my colleague called the next morning to tell me of her death so I wouldn’t have to hear it first on the news.

A descendant of Laotian royalty, Princess Oulayvanh Sethathirath was working to help Laotians in Thailand get a good education, to ensure that her culture did not die there—she was also getting her own education in leadership at a U.S. university so she would be prepared for the task when she went home to assume her role. She and her husband, Prince Anouvong Sethathirath IV were both assassinated. Their young sons are now orphans, their lives not what they should have been, this evil an aching gap the center around which they will now turn.

A course in global leadership with its nice, neat reading list stands undone and irrelevant in such a world where change is so feared it leads to murder. Chillingly, the syllabus was prefaced with this quote from Machiavelli: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.” As it turns out, this student was actually teaching me about leadership, not the other way around. It is one thing to read (or write) about leadership; it is another to be a leader. How pristine and neat and sometimes irrelevant is book learning; how messy is real life.  How often we confuse the teacher and the learner.

I’m reminded of these words by Martin Luther King, Jr (with many thanks to mytopography for use of her moving MLK collage):

“If you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day some great principle, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great issue, some great cause. And you refused to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house.

So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announced of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right.”

Princess Oulayvanh Sethathirath was thirty-eight years old.

What do I believe in so deeply that I would die for it? What fear keeps me from standing up—is it fear of what people will say? Is it fear of not having enough money? Is it fear of looking foolish or that people won’t like me? Is it a fear of being successful?

I used to believe that the most powerful human emotion was regret—that regret more than anything else would eat your insides out—I should have, I should have, I didn’t. (Given my focus on regret, imagine my regret when the book, Regret, came out and I hadn’t written it. How ironic!)

Now I know I was wrong. Regret is still a biggie, a deal breaker—it’s difficult to get past kicking oneself in the pants over what you didn’t do or did do, but now I know that the back of the monster on which regret sits—and on which mediocrity and overeating and procrastination and prejudice and jealousy and many other happy creatures sit—the back of the monster that holds all those up and feeds them is Fear.

Fear is a reductive force in the universe; it makes people small. It reduces your voice, your way of being in the world, your humanity, the reach of your arms out to others—everything about you shrinks, becomes small, closes in on itself, like visiting a foreign country and not being able to read any of the signs and becoming someone smaller than you really are, not laughing your big laugh because you don’t know, not going to the bathroom because it’s unclear which one wears the skirt. For every lack, there is a fear behind it: It is fear of success that feeds procrastination, for example. Fear is the All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet-of-Life. Insert your own food-related metaphor here.

When my older daughter, Emma, was younger, we moved from inside the city to the suburbs of Washington, DC, for a short, failed experiment in suburban living. I thought she needed a yard to play in; ironically we killed the grass within a month of moving in, not being the yard type. There was a forest behind our house (actually, a line of trees that seemed a huge forest to her) and one night, Emma told me she was afraid of bears coming out of the forest to get her at night. We had a nice long talk about irrational fears.

Months later at the Smithsonian Institution, we went to see a gorgeous Chinese calligraphy show. As we descended down a spiral staircase, there was a tall sculpture several stories high hanging from the ceiling around which the stairs circled. “See, Mama,” Emma whispered to me, pointing to the hanging sculpture, “there.” “There?” I asked. “Yes, there’s one of my erasable fears. I’m afraid things like that will fall.”

[And from that one moment in time came an important concept: “erasable fears.”]

“What?” I asked, not realizing what she meant. “You know—you know,” she urged. “It’s an erasable fear like when I was afraid of the bears coming into my bedroom.”

Fears. Are they irrational or are they erasable? Are they serving us in some way?

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Unlike Martin Luther King or Princess Oulayvanh Sethathirath, you may not literally ever have to die for what you stand for and believe in—but I think naming that principle, belief, person you would die for is to put a stake in the ground and say “here is my grounding, my bedrock, my all.”

Don’t we die a little everyday if we don’t walk toward that fear that holds up back, reduces us, makes us less than what we really are?

Stand up and walk toward your fear. Expand into it, embrace it, own it and name it, make it your pet, take it on walks, feed it, groom it, train it to heel, learn to love its mongrel face. That’s the only way you’ll stop it from yipping all day and night, and nipping at your toes. It’s the only way you can take your daily walks in the world without being dragged along by a wild, untamed fear.

Read this book: Art and Fear.

And don’t live to be ninety just to be breathing.