Tool For Tuesday: On Fear, And Forgetting Everything’s All Right

Now a word from our sponsor about fear.

What’s fear?

Forgetting Everything’s All Right.

Facing Everything And Recovering.

F—K Everything And Run.

I love finding new acronyms. Let’s see. Fully Embracing All Reality. (That was off the top of my head until I got to the Letter R and was stumped. Then I looked in my dog-eared yellow Roget’s Thesaurus—I received it for my bat mitzvah in 1970!—and opened to R and found Reality.) SO here’s a new one: Fully Embracing All Reality (which means remembering that our feelings are not facts!).

We can’t always not feel fear. It’s part of the package. We just have to shrink our fear down to a sizable package that we can carry. “Just do it” sounds easy but how can we just do it when we are carrying fear so great it makes our knees buckle?

There’s nothing that we are called upon to do that we can’t find the inner strength to do it. There are times when we simply must go forth, believing that there is the strength of the universe that we can plug into, and do what needs to be done. It’s like the cosmos is holding our hand and guiding us through a difficult journey.

Fear can be paralyzing. We do have the power to shrink it to manageable size.

Tool For Tuesday: Just for today, I won’t give into my fear. I will not let it stop me from moving forward. I will not forget that everything’s all right.

About dianabletter

Diana Bletter is the author of several books, including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award. Her novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins) was published in 2015. She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review, Times of Israel, and is a reporter for Israel21C, and many other publications. She is author of Big Up Yourself: It's About Time You Like Being You and The Mom Who Took off On Her Motorcycle, a memoir of her 10,000-mile motorcycle trip to Alaska and back to New York. She lives in a small beach village in Western Galilee, Israel, with her husband and family. She is a member of the local hevra kadisha, the burial circle, and a Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Druze women's group in the nearby town of Akko. And, she likes snowboarding and climbing trees.

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4 Responses to Tool For Tuesday: On Fear, And Forgetting Everything’s All Right

Marylin Warner says:

August 6, 2013 at 10:47 am

In the Big Picture, everything is all right. It’s the Little Picture that trips me up.
Thanks for another great post.
I LOVE the picture!

- dianabletter says:
  
  August 9, 2013 at 1:14 am
  
  Hi Marylin, I find it interesting that you’re good at the Big Picture but not the Little One. I think I’m the reverse. But it’s always a challenge on long lines in the supermarket!
  
KiKi Cutey says:

August 6, 2013 at 11:24 pm

Yes! Everything is happening FOR us even if it doesn’t seem so at the time. We’re only co-authors, someone/thing is helping us write the story and we have to trust our partner. I’m totally with Marilyn; I’m all good and calm when crisis strikes, but sometimes it’s the littlest thing that I can’t control that gets me all out of whack.

Thank you for sharing!
Love,
Kiera

- dianabletter says:
  
  August 9, 2013 at 1:13 am
  
  Hi Kiera, thanks for writing. It is hard to find the faith to believe that things are happening for us, not only to us. I like your idea of trusting “our partner” in life! I appreciate your insights, please write again! Best, diana