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.