Overcoming Fear

What does it take to push oneself just one step closer to doing the next right thing?

The next right thing often has an obstacle surrounding it when it stands as its own barrier to action: fear. Fear of something happening in any number of unforeseen scenarios or directions freezes most of us in place. Well, it certainly does that to me.

What fires up my fear today? Wasting time!! Today is cold and snowy and grey, not atypical for February in the Northeast. I slept in (Friday is my Saturday) and put off a scheduled Friday morning meeting until noon. Then my next plan was postponed to give my husband the car. Then the series of phone calls which were supposed to lead to another set of actions actually yielded no response, and so my plans have changed three times over since starting the day. It feels like I'm wasting my time.

True or not true? It seems like I can't be wasting my time if these changes are not coming from my own resistance. After all, I did what I said I would do and how dare I believe I can control someone else picking up the phone? Weren't the original plans just ideas, and aren't ideas flexible, made to move around and let themselves become other better (or worse) ideas with time and other people's energies and intentions intersecting?

We are either spending time or wasting it, but either way, time waits for no one. The suffering, the self-punishment for wasting time is itself a waste of time and healthy energy. Sometimes it takes me years to see a certain commitment that yielded great disappointment might have been a waste to begin with. But that doesn't add up to wasted time. We just can never know. That hindsight adds up to wisdom. This much is true. It helps to question the frame of mind that assumes wasted time when things change quickly or just don't go our way. The only time we waste is that set of moments we wish to escape from, not the ones we spend living in the possibility that meaning is available to us whatever is served up in front of our faces.