Fear and Change

When your heart starts racing and your hands start shaking, you know that the fear has set in. Fear? Yes…fear. Fear that your world is about to change and you don’t know how to stop it. Fear that you might not want to stop it but you don’t know who you will be or where you will be if you don’t. So your heart races and your hands shake…and you know, without a doubt, that something has to be done. You have to decide, soon, maybe in the next instant, and once that decision has been made it can’t be taken back. So what do you do? Do you embrace the fear and let it seep through you, let it soak into the bone and mix with your marrow? Or do you close yourself off and run, run as fast as you can in the other direction because that change, the unknown change, might be too much, it might be soul shaking and earth shattering?

Fear: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

Robert Frost wrote ‘Desert Places’ in 1936 and it ends saying:

…
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars –on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Change: to become different

In ‘The Black Cottage’ Robert Frost writes as a priest and says:

...
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so
it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths
being in and out of favour.

In The Dark

In the dark there’s a creak and it’s closing in. In the dark, I can’t move, I can’t breathe, and the creak, it’s closing in, getting closer.

Nothing…it stopped, the creak stopped. What does that mean? What was it?

…the silence…”Make it come back!” I finally scream through the dark. My voice bounces off the walls of what must be an empty room and slowly it all fades back into silence…into the dark.

I can’t take another moment, my body’s dying and my mind is starting to go numb. This darkness, this silence, it’s going to kill me. …and then the creak…it’s back, in the dark, right behind me. My mind begins racing again and this makes me feel more alive in the dark, all alone…at least I think. But then there’s the creak, right behind me. No longer getting closer but not moving away, just a slow steady creak. One after another; not a tap, but a creak, in the cold wooden floor that’s all around me.

I slide my fingers slowly over the wood beneath and around my body, small soothing motions while I lay in the dark listening to the creak. As my body begins to relax I come to the realization that I should be fighting this. I don’t know where I am, who brought me here or why. And for a second I start to panic, my heart begins to race and a hundred torturous thoughts sprint through my head…but then the creak…it calms me. My pulse slows and all the thoughts of the things that could happen fade away.

I allow the creak to wrap around me, making me feel at peace, at peace with being alone…in the dark. Eventually all thought fades away…everything just fades away…except the creak in the dark where I lie.

Heart-Attack's Prayer

How can I describe what it’s like to have your heart stop, for just an instant...to have it completely stop?

Your breath catches and everything starts to blur. In that instant your mind races faster than you ever thought was possible. You see everything you wished you would have done and your ears ring with shouts of things you wish you would have said. And in your head you scream at the very top of your lungs for another chance because God you know you can make it better!

In those few moments when your heart stops you pray so steadily and so hard for another chance. You BEG and PLEAD for that chance. You can make it better, you will be better, you’ll do ANYTHING….

…and then you gasp and your heart starts its steady thud thud again. It’s strange because the last few seconds seem like a fog and you can barely remember what happened or why it happened…but you know that something profound has occurred, or at least you think so. …but what was it? …were you supposed to do something now? Change something? After a moments thought you decide that nothing really did happen and that you must simply be very tired or stressed, over worked, under paid…and it doesn’t matter…life just goes on.

Who knows though…unfortunately next time you might not be so lucky…