While all this was going on, I needed to put out a newsletter. I felt that while I was so snowed under, I would not be able to come up with an article to go in it. Then lightning (or should I say spirit) struck.
I was expecting to go to this journal and find a couple articles that would work and use them (as I do that a lot of times when I blank). But I sat down and started writing. And what I wrote about was that I will no longer be afraid, that I will put energy into positive outcomes and not negative. That I will not let fear control me.
Then I did find an article in the journal that fit right in with what I had written to go as a second article in the newsletter. It deals with mind over matter. That second article is here.
The article that I wrote is here...
Fear. Fear is a powerful thing. We cloak the emotion of fear with words like worry, distress, uncertainty, uneasiness - descriptions that cause us to worry and, yes, to fear. It makes us spend too much time thinking about what could go wrong, rather than what should go right. As a former computer programmer, I know that with computers there is one perfect solution and thousands of wrong ones, and these wrong ones must be imagined and planned for. It makes one spend a lot of time asking "what could possibly go wrong?" That may work great for computers, but unfortunately applying that to life as well, is a bad idea.
We can fear a lot of things, many of which add up to the 'unknown'. If our personal situation changes (loss of job, friends, or a loved one), that brings about an unknown variable. Being unknown, we have to move through it as a learning process. While the one universal constant is change, change is what we fear the most, whether this be change for the worst, or for the better.
We fear bullies, whether they be on the playground, in the circle of people that we know, in businesses, in competition, or even government entities. Sometimes it is possible to stand up to bullies and sometimes it is not. We have been taught to turn the other cheek, but it is a difficult concept to embrace when faced with a negative force.
When we give in to fear, we expend a vast amount of our energies toward the things we are afraid of. But what we do is we bring what we fear closer rather than pushing it away. We give fear life, where it might not have had any previously. Just like the computer programmer spending all his time imagining all the negative possibilities, we keep imagining the possibilities that could occur if things go wrong. We keep playing out the negative scenarios in our head in an endless loop, but the one thing we don't do is play out the positive scenarios. But those positive scenarios are what we need to keep playing out in order to give energy to things happening in a positive vein. We have to pledge to stay positive, to put faith in the positive outcomes only, to ignore negative possibilities.
Look away from your fears. Take the pledge with me...
I pledge to look at positive outcomes only, to not give in to negative possibilities. I will embrace the unknown as it is a learning process in which positive growth is made. I will not give credence or energy to bullies whether they be personal or corporate or governmental. In doing this, I will apply positive energy to positive outcomes only, thus shaping a future where I can prosper.