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Friday, May 7, 2010

Fear

About two months ago I got a little dog. At first my cats were terrified of him. Imagine it from their point of view. You're living a peaceful, lazy life. Nothing scary ever happens to you, you're constantly loved and you can sleep soundly just about anywhere you please because you feel so safe. One day, this energetic, stinky, noisy litte creature comes in and starts wreaking havoc in your life. You can't move without it sprinting toward you, growling and jumping all over the place. So you hide all day long, in fear that if you come out, you'll be eaten alive. Then you get hungry. Your food is near to where the creature likes to stay. So you creep cautiously toward your food, keeping an eye on the sleeping creature. Suddenly, it wakes up. It notices you, but doesn't move. However, you're so scared that it's going to chase you, that you scramble and run away. It sees this mad dash for safety, and begins to come after you.
Now from the dog's point of view, he just wants to play. He see that the cats are running, so he assumes that they want to be chased. It's never his intention to hurt anyone. In fact he wouldn't bother with them if they wouldn't run in the first place.
Fear is a funny thing. Often times we're so afraid of something that we end up, unintentionally of course, initiating it. We're so afraid of messing up on the upcoming test that we can't concentrate on studying, therefore not knowing any answers to any of the questions and getting that F we feared. We're afraid our parents are going to say no when we ask to go with our friend on their family's vacation so we don't ask until the last minute, which doesn't give our parents enough time to think about it so they say no. We're so afraid of being rejected by our close friends, we decide not to put any effort into our friendships, and end up feeling rejected when our friends stop putting in effort as well. We're so afraid that the dog is going to chase us, we run at the first sight of him, thereby instigating him to chase us. The list goes on and on.
Ask yourself, is there anything in your life that you're letting fear control? Are you running from a dog that wouldn't chase you otherwise?
Oh and in case you're wondering, the cats eventually learned that if they stood their ground and didn't react to the dog, he'd leave them alone completely. They now live in peace with him, even chasing him once in a while to play.

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