The last couple of months I’ve been on a journey to correct a bunch of wrong beliefs. As an unexpected side effect, I’ve come to discover more about the nature of love and fear.
Anything you think of, a fear of the deep, a fear of death, a fear of spiders, a fear of losing someone you love, all have in common that they are rejections of a potential experience. In all these situations there’s the expectation of something undesirable, which you’re actively looking to avoid. When someone is afraid of deep water, they can envision themselves drowning in it. When someone fears spiders, they see the spider crawling on their arm and biting them. They want to avoid it actually happening in real life.
Love, on the other hand, is something that pulls us to an experience. When love strikes us, there’s a sense in which we want to be closer to the experience. We want to experience something, be absorbed into it. When we love cycling or hiking, or love someone else, we want to experience more of them. We may also envision the experience, like with fear. We may see ourselves climbing a mountain and feeling joy and love. Love pulls us to experiences. We want to experience whatever we love.
Fear makes us not want to experience something, and love makes us want to experience something. There’s another way in which these two emotions are separate. Fear often has a sense of familiarity with it, a sense of “Oh no, here we go again”. We often know what we are afraid of, and dread being in that state of mind again. We know what fear is like, it’s something we might’ve experienced often, and it’s familiar to us.
On the other hand, love is the complete opposite. Love is always fresh, revitalizing. Have you ever felt love that was boring or familiar? For me it always invokes a sense of newness and life. It’s the opposite of fear. Where fear is always the same horrible stuff, love is always fresh and renewing. It makes us feel alive, it gives a sense of openness and possibility, whereas fear gives a sense of closedness and entrapment.
I’ve noticed something new the last couple of weeks which I’ve never seen before. Fear transparently switching to love. It’s a really weird feeling, and now I’m convinced the two are actually really similar. They are like the two sides of a coin, but still the same coin, if you know what I mean. Like the way ice and steam are still both water, but just two different states. The way darkness is just absence of light. It happened multiple times over the span of weeks, but each time was just as weird. It always began as fear, and then it just shifted into love, just by itself. It’s like fear opened itself up, and by the act of opening it turned into love, without any other change necessary.
I live terrified of the future because of the things I’m going to make myself do, but at the same time I feel love for the new possibilities that might open up, and the two mix together and transform into each other. I always thought they were separate, and it’s not something I’m used to.
It’s difficult to put this kind of stuff into words. I hope I don’t appear like some intellectual that is trying to analyze his own emotions to look smart. I just wanted to share this, as I’ve never experienced something like it before. What are your thoughts, maybe you’ve experienced something similar? I’d love to know!