Eric Forbes

when fear comes into love
love doesn’t always prevail
no matter what you’ve heard
or read in books: I’m here to tell you.
love is one thing and fear is quite another

I thought that fear was an absence of love
that with enough love and enough time
fear would dissipate
that love would prevail
but I was wrong
it doesn’t always work out that way

fear gets stronger instead of weaker
fear gets bolder instead of quieter
it gets more established
it sets up boundaries
it speaks its mind and stays that way

I’ve had a lot of time experiencing it
I’ve had a lot of time exploring it
I’ve run from it, acted in spite of it,
and written so many words

in every case, fear is nothing
more or less
than not knowing

it’s an imagined horror leading to pain
that rarely comes to pass
harvesting precious attention
from the here and now
knowing what’s best

it cares for us
it knows us better
it wants us to be happy
reciting its lyrics
singing its song

fear, go fuck yourself!

FUCK OFF, FEAR! You hear me?
Leave me alone. Let me figure out my life without you and let’s see how that goes. I have a feeling that with enough time without you I’ll grow to become the man I’ve always dreamed of: confident, reliable, honest and true. Without you, I’ll be all those things and more. And you’ll fail to be present in my life anymore. You’ll be relegated to the world of memories, pasted into my scrapbook of fears, stored in the attic. Or why not burned right at once while I watch the words on the page burst into transformative flames?

You know, this idea of fear has really got me thinking. Maybe it’s a good thing that you can’t commit to me as your partner, your boyfriend, your man. Maybe this experience of being with you has lots of good aspects. Nothing really went wrong. When someone asks me “what happened to you two?” I’ll have a prepared statement ready for the occasion:

We had a difference of opinion about how we wanted to spend our lives together. What started out as soul-mates, turned into brothers, and became closer still. Then I asked ‘what are we?’ and the same answer came up: ‘not boyfriends.’ That seemed weird, since in my mind and heart, he was my #1 man in all the ways you could measure it and yet he didn’t feel the same way about me. So instead of hoping he would change in another 2 years time, I decided to get some space and find a man who wants to be fully present with me.

Fully present. Where did that come from? It might be the key to who I’m looking for. In order to be interesting to me now (vs. 2 years ago), he will be at least semi-enlightened and able to bitch-slap his fear of commitment and intimacy. His past affairs and relationships will have been just that: past-tense. His current reality will be a summation of his life experiences tempered by his powerful sense of presence in the here-and-now. How do I know this? Because I’m excited as I write this! I’m becoming more present. He will be present too. Fear will be what we used to imbibe before we knew better. Fear will be the stories we used to tell ourselves before we realized they were nothing more than ideas posing as facts. Yes. Indeed. Life is full of uncertainty and yet to fear the unknown is one of many responses one can take.

The Way of Fear

Live in fear. Worry about the past and what you did and what was done to you. Expect the same kinds of pain to happen again. Hang on to the totems of your life and worship them for the pleasure they gave you back then. Carve your memories into their infallible substance. Let your mind fill in and elaborate the details, providing for a rich multimedia experience inside your head. Let the matters of the day of this moment fall to the shoulder of the road, out of sight, unimportant. Convince yourself that avoiding the little things that present themselves to you each day is the best tack to take.

The Way of Now

I’m here. I’m here/now. Time still matters to me. It’s just not everything I think about all of the time. When it tries to dominate, I exhale my stale breath and take another while I hear myself doing it.

I exhale then I inhale deeply while paying attention to that. I can’t do it for more than a few minutes, but I never used to do it at all. With this new practice, I can see fear more clearly and it’s not all that bad.

At no time should fear enter love and win. Yet sometimes, in our case, it did. When one of the lovers moves on though, then what happens? An energetic shift occurs and what happens next is anyone’s guess. I’m anteing up, count me in. I want to see what materializes next! =E

Tagged: being present, fear, love