The fear of joy

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. – Erica Jong

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In my last post, I talked about using fear as a tool for growth. But why is growth so scary in the first place? Growing requires us to change, and change is often the thing we fear most — even if we genuinely believe it will make us happier than we are today.

We can approach change in only three ways: chance, crisis, or choice. We drift along, realizing only after the fact how far we’ve come from where we began. Or we’re forced into the unfamiliar, kicking and screaming and clinging to what we’re used to with all our might. Or, least likely for the vast majority of us, we decide consciously to try something different, hoping and trusting that  our constricted horizons will expand.

For the uncommonly centered and enlightened souls who have complete faith that they can handle the outcome of any choice, good or bad, change is a delightful adventure. I can manage to summon up that kind of innocent daring, oh, once a year or so. The rest of the time, I (and probably the rest of us) find it a challenge, and not always one I want to take on. Let’s face it: changing by choice, as opposed to chance or crisis, can be terrifying. If we fall into change, we can at least blame circumstance if we don’t like the results; if we’re forced into it, we can say we cracked under pressure and made a bad decision. But if we make a conscious and deliberate shift in our lives, and we end up feeling worse off than when we started, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

By the same token, though, if we choose not to change, we’re resigning ourselves to “good enough,” to “it’ll do,” to “I can’t really expect any better,” to feeling like the victim of our fate rather than the master of it. Embracing change, walking straight into it with our eyes open, is the only way to control our lives, insofar as we have any control over them at all. We may hate the fact that change is life’s only constant, but we have to accept it. If we have to figure out how to build our wings on our way down, we have the option of selecting our moment to jump off the cliff rather than waiting for random fate to push us.

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