Carrying Fear

This new project is to hold my feet to the fire. It’s time to write. I’m deadline-driven, even if it means setting my own deadlines. Finding a theme was easy. Collectively, the thoughts have started to pool together. Forty. The new decade looms closer than ever. And with it, there has been more fear than I have faced in my whole life.

Fear about not being able to have children before it’s too late. Fear of losing loved ones as they age. Fear about not getting married before I die. Fear about getting cancer. Fear about driving to Toronto. Fear about someone breaking into the house. Fear about not exploring my true potential. Fear about complacency. Fear of not exercising my creativity, my writing, because of letting everything else get in the way first. Fear of the impending climate crisis — it’s getting worse, right? Fear (and a smidgeon of curiosity) if/when society collapses and there’s total chaos. Fear of losing my youth, my big hair, my muscles, my energy. Fear of running out of money or having to work until I’m ninety. Fear of time, because there’s never enough time.

That was my fear brain dump. I’ve been carrying a lot of that fear for a long time. When I investigate and ask myself, “Why now?” a quiet voice says, “You’re turning forty.”

Someone once said, “age is like a toilet paper roll. The older you get, the faster you run out of paper,” and I can’t shake it. Paper = time. What a perfect description. I feel it. How did 2023 slip by so quickly? And next is 2024, and then I’m 40. But before that happens I want to reflect hard on my late thirties and step into my forties — fearless, and with intention.

Did I mention I’m a yoga instructor? My reflections are infused with tools and insights I’ve picked up over years of studying and practicing yoga and Buddhism. In both philosophical traditions, the lotus symbolizes purity. The pristine white flower has humble beginnings in mud, then grows toward the light to free itself from the murkiness. I seek that clarity too. The fear, it’s mud. It clouds all my experiences, especially at night when I’m trying to sleep. Worse, my remedy these days has been to get lost in social media. In yoga and Buddhism, this is obviously Maya at large, the illusion that what we see we think is real, and it distracts us from our truth.

I do not want to spend my days lost in the illusion, or sleeping so to speak, and my nights wanting to sleep. I want to live, and connect the dots that make up the sum of my 39 years of experience. And let that be my guide, my muse, into the next decade.

Join me if you’re as curious as I am.

Yours Truly,

Fearless Forty

P.S. I just realized that 2024 is a Leap Year, which means we get 366 days to celebrate life.