What Are You Afraid Of?

I read that you’re born with only two innate fears; heights, and loud noises.  Every other fear we carry with us is learned.  It made me think about how adaptive our brain is.  Once we learn to trust our environment, we unlearn, or put away those fears.  As we understand that loud noises do not always lead to danger, we become less afraid;  we adapt to our environment.  I saw an interview with a boy who lived in a war-torn country.  He had become so accustomed to loud noises, that as a shell went off nearby, he didn’t even flinch even though the camera crew did.  The boy had learned to discern which shells represented immediate danger and which could be ignored.   As we learn to crawl and walk, we learn to trust our coordination and our fear of falling slips to the further recesses of our mind unless it is reactivated later.  While these fears are being unlearned we learn new, necessary fears to keep us safe.

So what happens, when we’re adults? Do we ever learn to master our fears?  No, our amazing brains continue to develop; adding and subtracting what we should and shouldn’t be afraid of.  Pain is a great teacher.  As an evolved species, we don’t have to learn from pain, we can learn by other means, observation for example.  Our parents can tell us to stay away from something hot, better still we can see the cause and effect of what happens when someone else, say a little brother, doesn’t heed that advice.  But the best, most immediate and permanent lesson comes from experience, when you touch that hot stove and come away burned, you never want to touch it again.

Can we continue to take advantage of our adaptive brains?  Does all pain come with a lesson?  I think it does.  Do we learn from those lessons? That depends.  I guess the uber-evolved, the masters do, but depending on your level of evolution, you may be choosing to keep getting the same lessons over and over again.

If I stub my toe on the same brick every night, it doesn’t take me long to figure out I should move the brick, or at least step around it.  But what happens when the brick is a certain type of person I keep seeing in my life? Or worse, what happens when I’m the brick?

I can learn to avoid certain types of people, but it’s better to learn to work with the types of people I tend to avoid.

Still it’s tough to avoid the obstacle, when the obstacle is me.

I think I’ve grown to master most of what comes my way in my external environment, but somehow manage to ignore the brick walls inside my head.  When it comes to internal obstacles, I’ve learned from experience, observation, and also imagined behavior.

I imagine, I will say something stupid when asked to speak.  I imagine I will fail before I’ve tried.  I imagine the risk is greater than the reward.  So is it possible, to imagine new endings to my stories?  Can I learn to step around the bricks I’ve placed in my head or better still, get rid of them altogether?  I don’t know, but I imagine, it’s worth a try.

Dance Lessons

January always feels like a fresh start; a time of new possibilities; a time to aim toward the person I know I could be if I just applied myself. I feel ambitious and optimistic about the new and improved version of myself that I’m certain is just around the corner. I will exercise more, eat healthier, become more organized, declutter by closets and drawers, balance my checkbook, make sound financial decisions,  learn a new language, meditate, read, write, volunteer, be punctual revamp my wardrobe, eat more vegetables, drink more water, cut back on alcohol, cheese, sugar, processed flour, carbs, red meat. I’ll be a better friend, call my parents more often, I’ll be kinder to strangers. I’ll throw out my old holey underwear and replace it with new sexy lingerie. I’ll update my playlist with newer cooler music. I’ll strengthen my core, thighs and triceps, not to mention my mind heart and spirit.  It will be so easy, I can do it all by spending just 20-minutes a day in the 10-day, 21-day or 90-day challenge, depending on my level of ambition.

You know how this ends. In a few short months I will be a different person. I will no longer be driven by a mad list of self-improvements. In January, I will eat healthier, exercise more and improve my level of intellectual stimulation; a goal easy enough to accomplish considering I spent the last few weeks, eating Christmas cookies for breakfast, sitting on the couch and binge watching The Walking Dead.

By March, I will have eased up on the gas petal. That’s not to say I will have given up on my goals completely. But I have learned from experience that the best intentions often get messed up when life happens.  My hope for the new year is that rather than feeling defeated by the inevitable realities of life, I will continue to at least aim for my goals while allowing life with all it’s wonderful, unpredictable, uncontrollable, messy, glorious, tragic, miraculous events to happen.

I heard it said once in a yoga class that “Yoga, like life, is a dance between your will (what you aim for) and your prana or life force (what you allow for).” In other words, you live in that space between what you want and what really happens.

In yoga, I bend and stretch and hold, doing whatever I can to force my less than perfect body into aimed for poses. Sometimes, with practice, I get it right. Sometimes I’m too weak, too short, too thick or too inexperienced to get it. All I can do is aim for what my mind wants to do and accept what my body is able to do. I like the idea that it’s a dance rather than what it feels like – a wrestling match.  I wonder, is the dance where I find grace?

I think this year, I will focus  on enjoying the dance a little more. Sometimes it may be one step up and two steps back, but other times it might be two steps to the right and two to the left. Who knows, maybe I’ll waltz my way across the dance floor and onto a new challenge. There’s nothing wrong with a little ambition; an aim for a better version of myself, as long as it’s not at the expense of beating myself up for the person I am today.

This year, I will stop fighting with my dance partner. I will relax, feel the rhythm and embrace the experience. I will cha-cha or merengue or watusi my way in the general direction of my goals and I will enjoy the trip. Maybe I’ll even sign up for dance lessons.