Fighting Fear

Are you a lover, not a fighter?

“I'm a lover not a fighter."

False dichotomy. Fighting increases your capacity for love.

Your capacity for love is, unfortunately, circumscribed by your fear. Some people focus on reducing fear by creating safe spaces. Building trust in their fellow man. By removing things to be afraid of.

What about spaces you can’t control, and people you don’t know? Fear isn't irrational. Your capacity for love is circumscribed by fear the way a town is circumscribed by a palisade. There are actual threats out there. Your closest relationships are contained within a network of tightly held shared secrets. You can't be useful or loving if you're being torn to pieces, physically or emotionally.

Fearless enlightenment that you can access on a meditation pillow, or in a cuddle puddle, or an authenic relating workshop, that’s one thing. But what happens to your fearlessness — and thus your capacity for love, compassion, helpfulness — when your physical boundaries are in danger of being violated? Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. Safe spaces can turn unsafe quickly through small perturbations, or even the risk or suspicion that someone might misbehave, abuse that trust.

The fewer situations make you fearful, the more you can expand out into the world, the more people you can bring within your walls, safe in the knowledge that you know how to eject then. If you can be fine with someone being too close, too weird, too handsy, if you can enforce your own boundaries, your gifts can be strewn further from your center. You can let a homeless guy borrow your phone. You can go into that slightly shady looking place and make new friends.

Being hard to hurt is a virtue.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

meek: demonstrating power without undue harshness.