"Busy-ness is an excuse and a mask for fear–and it works like a charm. When you’re too busy, you don’t have to do or think about the stuff that scares you." (Mel Robbins)
This is a relevant issue, so the quote gave me pause to consider it's wisdom.
We can put off facing our fears for awhile, sometimes even a long time. We can avoid allowing ourselves to feel emotions that pull us down by various methods of distraction. Some even seem rather noble, and I have addressed this in previous posts about spiritual bypassing.
No matter our efforts at stalling, distraction, or avoiding our fears, at some point, we need to face our fears and work through them, not build massive freeways of busy-ness around them, or worse, to create perpetual chaos, over-scheduling, and pulling things off, barely, at the very last minute. All of these are defense mechanisms for emotional avoidance and spiritual bypassing.
What is it we need in order to face our fear-based busy-ness, procrastination, and chaos-creating? We need courage.
Courage is nowadays often considered the thing of heroes: to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen doing it very publicly, to be celebrated in media, rewarded with medals, given accolades.
However, a closer look at its linguistic origins is to find a more interior direction. According to author David Whyte, its origins are old Norman French, wherein courage literally means the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, with work. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging, and the way belonging affects us, shapes us, and breaks our hearts at a fundamental level. It is a ubiquitous dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection, and its possible–and inevitable–loss.
Afterall, it is not the loving and vulnerability which we fear; it is the risk we take because of their inevitable loss. Living, and deeply loving, will ALWAYS come packaged with grief at some point. None of us re getting out of here alive. To live with great love, to live to the point of tears, is to be deeply human. It is to be authentically human, without need for avoidance and distraction and busy-ness and masks. It is to live from courage instead of fear.
We live from courage whenever we allow ourselves to feel deeply and thoroughly what has already come into being, what has even already changed our future. From the inside, it can feel like confusion, pain, hurt, even anger; uncontrollable and massive emotions we must not allow ourselves to feel.
Can you live courageously? Can you live that deeply vulnerable? What scares you? What do you fear? What can you do to work through your fear? Do you cover it up or use distractions to bypass it, or do you allow it to carve out your soul and smooth the rough edges of your heart? What is the scariest part of that fear, why it paralyzes you or drives you to a bad point?
What is the worst thing that can happen if you face that fear?
And, what are you waiting for?
The miracle isn't always just shifting our perception. Sometimes, the miracle is finding the courage to start living from our deepest core, no matter what emotions and fears me must stop avoiding and face.
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