Fear Landscapes

"Becoming fearless isn't the point.  That's impossible.  It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it."  --from Veronica Roth's Divergent.

I've made a decision.  It's an exciting one.  I want to simply feel excited about it.  However, this week, I watched anxiety and fear rear up as I tried to wrap my head around the logistics of my next move.  I watched myself lose the clarity that had led to the decision.  I realize that as much as I love new adventures, new possibilities, and new challenges...a big part of me is ready for a space and time to exist for a bit without "new" always being an adjective that I need to use.  It's coming.  It's just not now.  There is "new" waiting for me, yet again (and, yes, I know that there always will be, but I wouldn't mind a few things remaining more familiar).   I walked through my own fear landscape this past week (in which there is truly only one fear, but it's a big one):  a fear of choosing incorrectly.

I'm grown up enough to own each of my choices, but still childish enough to wish that I could have everything play out just as I'd like it too.  However, I'm also wise enough to know that the ride will offer up possibilities I never even knew existed.  Hell, the past few years have proven this to be true over and over again.

George Eliot says, "It is never too late to be what you might have been."  There is something about the phrasing of this statement that is not quite right for me, maybe because I would prefer it to say:  "It is never too late to be who you are," but I appreciate the underlying sentiment.

Here's to possibilities that we never knew existed; here's to recognizing that no decision is all right or all wrong, and acknowledging that if we listen carefully, we can move forward in ways that are more attuned to how we want to move in the world (literally and figuratively) than they might be otherwise.