Embrace life. Face Fear. Court Uncomfortable Situations

Pain and Pleasure

I must admit that I prefer pleasure to pain, fun times to boring ones, and friends to foes. In my constant attempt to control my emotional state based on these preferences I found myself grasping for and trying my best to hold on to those “good” feelings and when situations in my life arose which I interpreted as not feeling “good” I grew frustrated and withdrawn.

Attempt to Control

It was a scary feeling to experience a perceived lack of control over my internal state, or mood. This created many problems in my life. I became hypersensitive to stimuli that I perceived as contributing to or taking away from my happy place. In allowing myself to go down this path I was giving up control in my life to the external environment. If I could not control the world then at least I could control my immediate environment. I could choose to stay inside my house rather than venture outside into the unknown. I was hiding, and it felt shitty. I longed for human contact and reminisced about times past and old friends. Why couldn’t the world be like that again?

Death Therapy

Then I realized that I would be dead someday. I saw myself laying in a coffin, a peaceful look on my face, and it came to me that with all the perceived uncertainty that I was hiding from there remained and will always remain that one certain event. There will come a time when I will no longer have a choice of whether or not to venture out into the big unknown world and try this or try that. And this feeling is liberating. Things, which once seemed very scary, now appear funny and inconsequential. The knowledge of impermanence in this life is comforting.

Success!

I admire successful people because they are tenacious. They are uninhibited by failure because they know that immediate consequences are not necessarily correlated with future consequences. I may be turned down today. I might be rejected, I might be ridiculed and laughed at, but so were many others who were on to something special.

Resolution

I hereby declare that I am not afraid of the world. I am not afraid of the unknown, because I know that I will and must die, and this realization has set me free from the fear of pain. I would rather try and fail a million times than approach my dying breath lamenting time lost and chances wasted.

Embrace life. Face fear. Court uncomfortable situations.

Daniel Millsap