Maybe all children are fearful. I don’t know. I just remember, as a little girl,
being terrified a lot. Mostly, I was afraid of three things: nuclear war, Nazis
and the Rapture.
I was a child of the 50s with a father who returned from World War II with a bullet in his knee and night terrors. In my nightmares I hid from Nazis who searched for little girls in closets.
Then
came the cold war. I was taught how to hide under my desk in school in case
a nuclear bomb was launched. Even in college, I was certified as a bomb shelter
manager.
But, my biggest fear was the Rapture. For those of you lucky enough not to know that term, it is, according to fundamentalist Christians, the time when all the good Christian folk are taken bodily up to heaven, before the Apocalypse starts for the rest of us of sinners. I was only about 5 years old, but I was pretty sure I was not good enough to be taken up. Whenever I was left alone, I was convinced that the rest of my family had ascended into Heaven while I had been left behind to face the four horse men.
Plus, I was a sick little thing. Plagued with asthma, I never learned to run or play like normal kids. I read, watched a lot of matinee movies on TV, and talked to the guides and spirits who take care of sickly kids like me.
Now, I am telling this tale because I am not fearful anymore. It struck me, as I sat down to write this month’s column, that one of the things one needs to be a good intuitive is courage. It takes courage to predict things without "proof." You need to be brave to stand up to the so called skeptics.
Then I thought to myself, I AM courageous. And I wondered, "When did THAT happen? How did I get from being that terrified little girl to where I am today?"
Courage, sometimes, is feeling fear and doing what needs to be done anyhow. I am not sure we can rationally talk ourselves out of fear. Looking back, I am pretty sure I had nothing to fear from the Nazis. The bomb didn’t drop on Hinckley. And, if the Rapture occurred, it sure left a bunch of us still around.
I finally figured out that none of those fears was even mine. Mostly, it was my parent’s fear that I was picking up intuitively. My Dad was the one who fought the Nazis. My Mom was the person terrified of Hell. The media was pandering my fear of bombs. The fear was not even mine, yet it crippled me for years.
So, in adulthood, I always ask when I feel fear: "Is this mine?" If I can’t trace it to a real, concrete event in my life, it is probably NOT my fear and I can let it go.
If a car is bearing down at me and I am standing in the middle of the street, then fear is rational and will hopefully get me to jump. Other than that, fear seems to be mostly a mind killer.
Lately, there seems to be so many people around who are trying to get me to feel their fear. I am determined to refuse. Been there, done that, ugly T-shirt.
I am not going to be afraid of a bad economy or a war in a land I have never even visited. I choose not to worry about someone stealing my identity or whether the additives in my food might make me sterile.
And, 2011 is looking like a very good year.
Blessings to all you courageous souls.
