THE LOVING ART: Part II “Cry First”

Love fascinates; love frustrates.  It’s a soft whisper or raging cyclone; an allegorical language innately understood yet defying all logical explanation.

As a child, love has only one meaning: your full and complete attention. Hungry, wet, or upset, babies cry until someone appears with food, dry clothing or hugs and kisses.  And so a behavior is learned: stress expressed brings the pleasant reward of sudden attention, i.e. love.

In children, our “cry first” behavior is refined then battle tested. Who hasn’t witnessed with empathy, or sympathy, the embattled parent vs. a child in a full-blown tantrum or meltdown?  The behavior demands attention, but is also testing the boundaries of unconditional love.

By adulthood, hopefully, most people come to the realization that attention falls far short of love.  Yet attention alone is sometimes enough to escape our separateness – the feeling of being desperately alone. Unfortunately our self-serving and desperate need to feel connection also influences the key question we ask of love. Rather than seek out the answer to how can I love, in ignorance we plead to discover the secret to the question, how can I be loved.  Few ever question their own capacity to love, but know intimately the importance of being loveable.

Getting to loveable in our society is conveniently assigned to gender.  Social convention encourage men to be successful, to build wealth and grab for power.  To be love worthy as a woman is to be attractive, fertile, and nice with sugar and spice.  When not blessed with natural assets – beauty, sex appeal or a fat inheritance – we develop other social qualities.  We work at being popular, or cultivate a pleasant personality as our flytrap for a beloved.

Given the right stimuli, love, or falling in love, is, in the eyes of most people, relatively easy.  Under the influence of enough lust, alcohol, loneliness or accumulated boredom, even strangers can find themselves in love, or at least a close enough facsimile – sudden intimacy.  What’s damn hard about love is finding, or attracting, the right object to love, or finding, or attracting, the right object to love us equally.

Seeing others as objects makes it relatively easy to consider ourselves as market commodities and justify our expectations for mutually favorable exchange on the love market. We choose the attractive man or ideal woman with an eye on qualities that return equal, or better, market value. Picking a partner becomes analogous to selecting stocks or bonds – today 1 in 5 new relationships get their start only after potential partners have evaluated a manifesto of personal assets on an online dating site.  A sweet deal can enhance ones economic cache, advance their social rank, or provide a beautiful gene pool.  Love, by default, becomes a dividend earned.

Cold and commoditized as modern mating may seem, at least it grants the privilege to choose the object desired.  In many traditional societies and cultures love is never spontaneous, never a personal choice.  Marriage is a ceremony that seals a contract between factions.  A worthy match is counted in heads of livestock, parcels of land or measured in precious metals, not on whether two people are in love, or will ever find love amidst their appointed duty to custom.

Arranged, or self imposed, we all want to believe love can have a happy ending, but Erich Fromm serves up the callous truth.  In The Art of Loving he writes, “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.  If it were the case with any other activity, people would endeavor to find the reasons for the failure, and learn to do better – or give up the activity altogether.”

And my heart said, Amen!

So why are we such pathetic love underachievers seemingly committed more to making money, or gaining success, prestige, and power?  Love, in essence, is a profitless venture.  We can’t make it happen, only fall into it with blissful ignorance.

It’s out of ignorance that once in love we can’t help but be human: we exploit attention wishing it to bring us love; we mistake or substitute passion and affection for love; we aim to fall in love as our goal while relationships become burdensome; we yearn for what we once took for granted but long to find again – unconditional love; we remain ignorant, even unconcerned, about our own capacity for loving, and we obsess, or lament, over what we believe is love’s true and only purpose, to make us happy.

In the pursuit of happiness love becomes a life consuming concern, but few ever reflect on the core question: how did I learn love?  Children have no power over being loved and an infant can only interpret being fed, sheltered and cuddled as being loved.  By nature, and blood, parents, offspring, siblings and relations have a loving bond built in.  As we become individuals we gather strangers into our tribe to treasure as friends we love. To love thy neighbor as thyself is an ideal most believe elevates love in mankind beyond flesh, yet it’s ecstasy of the flesh – the transcendent experience of romantic love – that’s coveted as the key to personal joy, but romantic love chooses us, it happens to us, either by fate, or by cupid, we fall, like a helpless victim – in love.

How easy then to love?  What skill is required beyond feeling, what practice necessary beyond experiencing the ride, what mastery required other than suffering the disappointments and heartbreaks, and what legacy is there to pass on when there is nothing to be learned?  Yet in my own life, I wonder, how much suffering could have been averted, how much richer my experiences and my relationships had I been taught that love, like trigonometry, must be learned and studied, that loving is a labor chosen, a practice committed to over a lifetime, and an art mastered not only for the sake of our own happiness, but also for those tiny voices that cry for attention but want to understand the profound difference it would make to rephrase one question.  To ask not what can love do for me, but ask instead, what capacity, what potential, do I possess to love?

I once believed love was but the rose, only to learn true love is the labor to seed, the patience to root and the devotion to accept even the thorns. ck

The Loving Art: #1 Birthright

How do we come to love?  We are certainly not born as loving creatures.  As babies the universe revolves only around our needs.  As children love becomes a quickly mastered art of manipulating our audience to entertain our simplest urge.  I’ll say it – the greatest gift of childhood is diplomatic immunity for the narcissist we are.

Coddled as babes – or not, Mother Nature has never played favorites to us, the human animal.  Her lessons are not of love, rather survival of the fittest; kill or be killed.  As humans, we are defenseless against the elements, and vulnerable prey to just about every beast or vermin that walks, slithers or flies.  To survive, we learned strength in numbers.  Thus the egocentric, solitary man became a social animal.

In communion as tribe members, mankind – the animal gifted with insight and reason – came to discover another vulnerability – this one a demon found within.  This torment is our separation from nature, and a haunting separateness from one another.  Reality is, we are all born alone, and we die alone.  Not to be cynical, but life is but a short space in time sandwiched between birth and death.  In that short period of time we are granted very rare opportunities to escape the prison that is our loneliness.  The only instrument capable of affecting our collective state of aloneness – short or long term – is love; it is our saving grace, like a personal flame to draw others close to our solitary soul.  Only love can pacify the fear and anxiety of separateness – the condition of becoming aware of being alone.

In community, we, the individual, had to learn trust in our fellow man.  In fellowship with others, our animal needs, like the call to mate, and our basic craving for companionship, evolved into a desire to serve, and a capacity to care for others.  The zenith of this maturity is love.

It’s not always obvious or exposed, but seeds of love are abundant in us all.  We all carry a boundless personal store with choices to lock it away with fear within our hearts, or plant it anywhere we please: onto objects, onto ideas, onto philosophies and doctrines, or onto each other. Who would argue that of all the things that humans are capable of loving, that love we share with one another is our most satisfying life achievement, though equally, can become our gravest folly.

Even with the reverence we show love, our addiction to love, we routinely take love for granted. It’s as though we’re entitled to love, like a birthright requiring no lessons, an ingrown talent requiring no practice, or a vehicle we drive purely on instinct.  As kids we mimic the love practices of people within proximity to us, but can anyone pinpoint what about love determines whether it manifests as our deepest joy, or provokes a lifetime of frustration and pain?   Such questions are rhetorical curiosities we cycle silently inside our heads.  Sobering questions about love, when they come, if they come at all, typically rise when love fails us.  Even then the question most lamented is why is love so cruel.

I’ve asked this very question more than once in my life, or at least until I broke through to smarter questions like what is love – really, or why does love feel different depending on the object of love.  Why is a mother’s love felt differently than love of a father; why is love of self felt apart from love of God, and why does brotherly love, or love for our fellow man – an act that holds peace on earth in the balance – create less pain than the challenges inherent in romantic love?  These and other unasked questions are the subject of upcoming blogs: The Loving Art.  Love for you to share the journey with me.

Mothers Milk, and Honey

I recently revisited a book that a few years ago course-corrected my life.  It’s an unassuming book written by psychologist, social philosopher and author, Enrich Fromm.  For me it’s a masterpiece in less than 150 pages.  Its title, The Art of Loving.

The book examines all forms of love: brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love, and love of God.  It offers sobering insight into the practice of becoming a loving person.

Poor love, so misunderstood.  We assume it to be as natural as breathing, but instead it’s natural like learning to walk: falling and failing.  As children we face our disappointment without fear, simply with blind purpose.  However, as adults, we face the challenge of learning love, especially intimate love, with scars and painful memories that convince many it’s too damaging to try anything beyond knowing how to crawl.

One form of love we sense comes as natural as breathing is motherly love.  To underscore the point, Fromm references symbols.  Land, the symbol of mother – like mother-earth.  In this instance land represents “the promised land” flowing with milk and honey.

Milk is the symbol of the first aspects of love – care and affirmation.  Honey is life’s sweetness – the pure joy of being alive.

By nature, a majority of mothers provide milk to a suckling child, but few can provide honey, too.  How is this?  In order to give honey, a mother must not only be a good parent, she must also genuinely be a happy person.

Dr. Fromm maintained that the effect of a mother’s natural disposition on her child could never be exaggerated or overstated.  A mother’s love is transparent to her young, her joy infectious, her anxiety poisonous.
Honey in a mother’s disposition instils a love for life in a child, a passion for living, a feeling that it is good to be alive, and that it’s good to have been born.  It’s an attitude grafted onto the soul of a child.

Think of it, of your friends, how many do you sense got only milk as an infant, and how many tasted honey as well?  How many do you know who live life perpetually in a land of promise they initiate?

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. Enrich Fromm

7 Chakras of Fear: #7 Worry

“Don’t worry, be happy,” Bobby McFerrin’s insufferably simple ditty though remarkably inspiring seems easily impossible. Why else does worry persist like a cancer on the human experience?

The emotion of fear – real or imagined – is a natural trigger for fight or flight in the human body, but contaminates the mind with incessant worry.  Fear it seems is more common than enlightenment, more common than love, even more so than the common cold, and worry is the pandemic virus.

The last few posts have explored the more prominent human fears as raised in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think & Grow Rich”.  However, death, old age, ill health, criticism, loss of someone’s love, and poverty only tip the iceberg on fears at our disposal.  Regardless of how we conjure our personal collection of anxieties, the common denominator and common conductive agent of fear is worry.

Worry – regardless of emotional triggers – anticipates the negative and preempts living life for fear of catastrophes we imagine.  Sadder is when worry is projected over the life of others – such as parents separating children or loved ones from experiences that carry any shadow of risk or life-lessons that can potentially inflict pain.

In one form or another we all worry; its part of life.  It encourages us to practice safe sex, buckle our seatbelts, buy insurance; resist poking the bear, or from trailing blood into the surf.  It’s providence and common sense, but to avoid wading into open water due to fear and worry alone is classic paranoia.

This is not to decry worry.  There are appropriate moments: when facing a doctor’s prognosis, or anticipating mankind’s destruction of our planet for instance.  The emotion of fear is never trivial, but neither is it blind or binding, and worry, though a natural foreshadowing to fear, need not be hypnotic or debilitation.

After-all, what is there beyond dying young that can possibly allow us to elude old age; what is there that can overcome death beyond truly surrendering to live in the present moment; what is there that can sooth criticism beyond becoming your very best; what is there that is healthier than positive thought and uncompromising choices; what is there to gain in losing an intimate love if not learning to love ones self; what is there that eradicates poverty quicker than acquiring riches immaterial to material measurement; and, what or who is to say the answer to worry isn’t in the insufferably simple sentiment of a pop song.

  Here is a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don’t worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy……

PS: Featured Images for The 7 Chakras of Fear

7 Chakras of Fear: #6 The Fear of Poverty

“If poverty were a man, I would have slain him.”  Ali ibn Abi Talib

Why do you do it?  Why peel yourself from a bed that remains warm as long as you’re in it; why journey reluctantly to an 8-hour prison; why give 5 days in return for 2, and why trade youth for a meager stipend in retirement?  Why settle for this treadmill if not for fear of what may come if you dare stop: the humiliation of poverty.

The fear of poverty is, without doubt, the most debilitating of the basic fears – personally, socially, globally.  Ironically, poverty is not about money; it’s behaviors inherited and attitudes accepted as fate.  It’s a fear that fertilizes paranoia, anesthetizes ambition and stifles the confidence to demand more of life…of self.

For most of this series – The 7 chakras of Fear – I’ve taken liberty to personalize concepts introduced in Napoleon Hill’s classic read, “Think and Grow Rich”.  The book unravels a blueprint for financial liberation, but on the topic of wealth creation, and the fear of poverty that circumvents it, he is particularly vociferous.

In his words: “poverty takes the charm from one’s personality, destroys the ability to think accurately, diverts concentration of effort, turns willpower into nothingness, destroys ambition, beclouds the memory, and invites failure in the heart, discourages friendship and invites disaster in a hundred ways, leads to sleeplessness, misery, and unhappiness – and all this despite the obvious truth that we live in a world of over-abundance of everything the heart could desire, with nothing standing between us and our desires, except a lack of definite purpose.” 

With great passion, and poignancy, he lays bare 7 hard truths about poverty: indifference, indecision, doubt, worry, over-caution, procrastination and settling for less.  It’s a long, hard look into an unflattering reflection…

INDIFFERENCE: Commonly expressed through lack of ambition; willingness to tolerate poverty; acceptance of whatever compensation life may offer without protest; mental and physical laziness; lack of initiative, imagination, enthusiasm and self-control.

INDECISION: The habit of permitting others to do one’s thinking. Sitting on the fence.

DOUBT: Generally expressed through alibis and excuses designed to cover up, explain away, or apologize for one’s failures, sometimes expressed in the form of envy of those who are successful, or by criticizing them.

WORRY: Usually expressed by finding fault with others, a tendency to spend beyond one’s means, personal neglect, lack of poise, self-consciousness and lack of self-reliance.

OVER-CAUTION: The habit of looking for the negative side of every circumstance, thinking and talking of possible failure instead of concentrating upon the means of succeeding, knowing all the roads to disaster, but never searching for the plans to avoid failure. Waiting for “the right time” to begin putting ideas and plans into action, until the waiting becomes a permanent habit. Remembering anyone who has failed, and forgetting those who have triumphed.

PROCRASTINATION: The habit of putting off until tomorrow what should have been by now. Spending time in creating alibis and excuses to avoid doing the work.  Refusing to accept responsibility when trouble is anticipated as a result of an action; willingness to compromise and avoid confrontation. Compromising with difficulties instead of harnessing and using adversity as a stepping-stone to advancement.

EXPECTING LESS: Bargaining with life for a penny, instead of demanding prosperity, opulence, riches, contentment and happiness.  Association with people who accept poverty instead of seeking the company of those who demand and receive riches; planning what to do if and when overtaken by failure, instead of burning bridges and making retreat impossible. Weakness of – or – total lack of self-confidence, lack of purpose, self-control, initiative, enthusiasm, ambition and sound reasoning.

In a world of supreme abundance, poverty, and the fear it inspires, persists as the dominant state of mind.  It is a condition so insidious it consumes our lifetime.  I once met poverty, or so I thought.  I was jobless, dire; living by the grace of bank overdrafts and pleading time from the landlord.  But poverty had begun even before I ever took my first job as a small boy and only grew wilder and indifferent to earnings.

My personal poverty was subtle… normal…routine – as routine as leaving a warm bed 5 days from 7, as trading my today for a hopeful tomorrow – all the while oblivious that this fear had programmed my behavior, insured my compliance, and conditioned my acceptance of less.  Poverty, I learned, is not a dollar value; it is ignorance, a liability of lack and a life-consuming diversion.  Wealth won’t cure it or 95% of lottery winners wouldn’t be penniless today.  More zeros guarantee more paranoia unless the fear of facing personal foibles can overthrow the more popular fear of poverty.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.”  Samuel Johnson

7 Chakras of Fear: #5 The Fear of Loss of love

This series is based on a chapter in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think and Grow Rich” introducing the basic human fears.  I dub them the 7 Chakras of Fear.  From the fear of Ill Health, Old Age, Death and Criticism, we explore the Fear of Loss of Love.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18)

For all, life is suffering a condition from which recovery seems futile.  It begins with a parent’s love for a child – a mother’s self-sacrifice, a father’s faithful devotion.  Our birthright of suffering evolves from their unconditional love; an Eden no other earthly experience can replicate.

Acknowledged, not every child is blessed to parents able of giving love unconditionally, nor are we all born into love that remains past infancy.  Yet most newborns find nurture in some way, which summarily opens a wound only one strain of love can ever heal.  Our wound? Our deepest human fear: that we are not enough, and we will be separate from love.

Teens and young adults leave the nest responding to the siren call of intimate love, most with a love blueprint drafted on memories of being coddled as a baby, indulged as a child and forgiven as a teen.  Leaving home – leaving unconditional love – is to descend into a world that coddles no one, indulges – but with consequences, forgives – but at a price, and dispenses love with conditions…pending.  Compelled, like salmon migrating back up stream, we seek to find what was once effortless, to remake where we began…to love without fear.

The fear of losing love is an anxiety that never fatigues.  By definition, fear is an emotion sensitive to a perceived threat.  “Till death do us part”, is a vow that exposes our fixation to make love a guarantee.  Sad though, even when the partner remains, nothing can guarantee love will remain in them.

Love lost is the most damning of all human fears.  As much as love creates wonder, lost love stirs destruction in body, mind and soul.  The pain of love lost is stuff of legend, lore and personal memory.  Books and scripts fill libraries with literary accounts of lost love, it stains the walls of fine-art galleries with pained beauty, and it scores the soundtrack of every heart that has ever loved, and lost.

Love lost…who hasn’t been dumped at the gates of that hell?  Who hasn’t been perpetrator-victim of divisive, dangerous or desperate thoughts?  Who hasn’t tasted jealousy ~ the bitter poison in the wine of love?  Who hasn’t tried not to hurt, or to be hurt, and failed?  Who hasn’t mistaken love for its foils: infatuation and lust? Who hasn’t sought out love and found in its stead, fear?  And who hasn’t come to realize unconditional love is not an act of being loved, rather one of loving…unconditionally.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  Erich Fromm

7 Chakras of Fear: #4 The Fear of Criticism

This series is based on a chapter in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think and Grow Rich” introducing basic human fears.  I dub them the 7 Chakras of Fear.  From Ill Health, Old Age and Death we face the Fear of Criticism.

“We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship.” 

Apparently, esteemed statesman of the French Renaissance, philosopher and literary poet, Michel de Montaigne, never knew your neurotic, controlling boss, never lived with your demeaning, manipulating mate, nor did he endure criticisms from your family applied like fresh paint to stain your fragile psyche.

The typical child – according to social science research – will hear the word “NO” approximately 40,000 times before first grade; eight times more than yes.  No’s, even well intended to guide youth, chip away self-confidence and toughen or tenderize the skin.

What’s your skin made of?  Teflon, so criticism can’t stick, but neither, too, do compliments.  Does it stretch so thin that inner rage, paranoia and self-loathing bulge like veins from the slightest questioning tone?  Or do you shade like a chameleon to please everyone and avoid the coarse pain of criticism?

At the very least, criticism makes a normal, healthy person uncomfortable.  However, for some, it’s an on ramp to seething anger and resentment, or a slide into deep depression.  So what drives people so crazy?  Maybe that opinion, often unsolicited, unwelcomed and unappreciated, auto-filters through our insecurities to trigger our primal fear: that we are not enough – rejection.  Once in motion, drama ensues, moods change and even trivial choices – how we dress, or with whom we associate – become the subject to what others think, judge or censure.

Cognizant of its influence or not, criticism influences our quality of life.  Rampant, it kills initiative, robs imagination, limits individuality, retards self-reliance, destroys self-esteem and erodes the spirit.  Erosion that began with 40, 000 no’s.  That single word, along with unnecessary criticism, emasculates the young, builds inferiority complexes and channels inner voices that repeat self-limiting dialogue.

On a downtown street recently, I passed a beggar with a hand scribbled sign.  The words, “I’m ugly”, written in bold letters, stabbed my heart as I gazed on the person who wrote this sad declaration.  It compelled me to crouch down beside the author to find out why this beautiful young girl felt compelled to think ugly.  My heart heavy, I left knowing she valued alms more than heartening words that contradicted the lie she sells herself.

Upon reflection, I realize I’m no different from her. In fact, I admire this beautiful beggar with her ugly lie.  We both live imprisoned with self-criticizing voices, but she exploits her demons in public, while I keep up appearances.

People naturally fear criticisms inherent in failure; however, a deeper fear comes from being criticized for engaging the risk to try.  Parents do irreparable damage to children with callous criticism, and although criticism may be turned to key self-motivation and inspire personal growth, typically it only seeds fear and harvests resentment in the human heart.  Criticism: is one service of which everyone is given too much.

Small, petty things are the focus of the fear of criticism.  It’s principal to our personality, primed by emotion and slave to dark insecurities that belie our self worth.  The fear of criticism is pre-programmed by fallible role models and reinforced by insecure figures of authority, or brave friends.

7 Chakras of Fear: #3 The Fear of Ill Health

This series is based on a chapter in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think and Grow Rich” introducing basic human fears.  I dub them the 7 Chakras of Fear.  From Death and Old Age we challenge the Fear of Ill Health.

What if you were suddenly infirmed…bed ridden?  What would change…how fast?  What would come of your ambitions, aspirations and dreams?  What of your friendships and dearest relationships?  What of the money you can’t earn, or save?  What of your responsibility to family, and what of your faith?

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”  Susan Sontag’s reminder that though we wish for good health, we will suffer from disease, injury and the fate of choices made over time.

Ill health is the original sin, committed against ourselves.  But what of the original question – what is health?  Is it a sense of feeling good?  Is it a feeling of being fit?  Is it being thin, or is it simply avoiding sickness?

According to WHO (The World Heath Organization): health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity.  The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine cuts to the chase and points fingers: health is the result of an individual responsibility of choosing healthy over non-healthy.

The weakest link in human health is human choice.  Mark Twain got it right when he quipped, “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.“  Twain – for the record – died of a heart attack.

Health at times seems fickle even unfair: chain smokers living to 100, or athletes dying in their prime only justify excuses for poor choices and sloth. But on the other hand, turning obsessive-compulsive – aka a fitness Nazi – can’t guarantee a clean bill of health either.  The saddest irony is sculpting a strong temple in flesh, but around a fearful mind that conjures up illness on its own.

Interesting to know, 75% of all visits to doctors and physicians are made by people suffering imagined physical symptoms of a disease they fear – common hypochondria.  In raw contrast, doctors and nurses tend to the sick and contagious – even through pandemics – never allowing themselves to fall victim to disease.  Immunity for them comes from an absolute lack of fear of disease.

We fear illness like our ancestors feared mercurial Gods.  No disrespect intended, but even atheists respect the wrath of disease.  We all fear becoming citizens in a subculture of the sick: taking residence in sanitariums and hospitals, being infirmed within the walls of our own homes or being reduced to living dead trapped inside a body diseased and in decay.  To know such a fate can befall us – haunts us.

We suffer the seeds of fear from forces over which we have no control: death and growing old.  However, the specter of ill health presents us a measure of influence over providence.  That is, should we choose to do the things we sometimes rather not.

Fear need not be a factor in ill, merely a fever to be broken.  ck

7 Chakras of Fear: #2 The Fear of Old Age

This series is based on a chapter in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think and Grow Rich” discussing basic human fears.  I dub them the 7 Chakras of Fear and from the Fear of Death, now the Fear of Old Age.

“What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.’” Lord Byron’s pen bled these words over a hundred and fifty years ago though he himself never grew old – he died at age 36.  Still the poet was intimately in touch with the fear of growing old.

Old age represents a deep fear of loss.  It laments the inevitable loss of a responsive body, a resilient mind, of economic and social freedoms, of friends and friendships, physical fertility and vitality, and loss of sexual desirability.  The anxiety over fading looks and ebbing vigor are reason enough for multi billion-dollar industries to thrive.  Little blue pills peddled to men, and for women the belief that beauty can be cosmetically preserved past nature’s due date.

In a society where youth and beauty are revered, the old are qualified by number, pushed from the spotlight and warehoused out of harm’s way.  Ageism, which is abuse and neglect based on age, literally kills the elderly at a rate faster than reviled prejudices including racial violence, religious intolerance and homophobia.

Words of the elderly eerily foreshadow what is feared of growing old, “I’m terrified that one day I’m going to die and they’re not going to find me for a week”. Growing old alone is a terrifying universal fear, but so too is feeling the weight of being a burden to children or family as health fails or dementia consumes the mind.

The thought of losing the faculty that links endearing memories of family, friends, even of the love of a lifetime, evoke core primal fears.  Disconcerting also, living with paranoia that loved ones are circling, gathering for the spoils.  Age is a cruel turn from independence to utter dependence – of becoming a child again, but cursed with the stubborn insecurities of an adult.

Even if a number is not your personal demon, the tacit, or at times overt judgments that qualify and disqualify an individual’s contribution, or value, to society based solely on a number is pressure enough to lie about that number, or to encourage extreme remedies that blur the lines with surgery.  But looks can be deceiving. Either by genetics or by conscious self-preservation, I don’t look the number that is my age.  I do not behave like that number, and I don’t think parallel to the number assigned me, yet the number has cost me someone’s love and limits economic opportunities under control of those who judge by number.

My fear of aging is this: at times I feel born to resolve a Rubik Cube puzzle not knowing the amount of sand in my hourglass.  I observe the driven and gifted succeed swiftly as if mentored by greater forces.  I also witness the ignorant remain blissfully unaware of all things but the ravages of time.  Me, I feel the struggle to gain traction and to become relevant.  My fear is that growing old is a slow realization, but being old is a sudden reckoning, and the moment of crossing the Rubicon isn’t a marker or a boundary, but merely a state of mind.

To reach a golden age portends of having earned a measure of power, wealth or influence that supplant youth. Yet these worldly graces remain tenuous and subject to paranoia and fear of loss.  Undervalued is the golden gift of age.  A gift that can’t be bought, gifted, stolen, borrowed or perjured.  It can only be gained – yet not guaranteed – with growing old; it’s a gift fear can’t tarnish: the gift of wisdom.

Gerontophobia – ever heard the word?  I never knew it existed. Gerontophobia is a fear of elderly people.  Seriously!  Now we’re heading into Monty Python territory, but I date myself.

7 Chakras of Fear: #1 The Fear of Death

“The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns” is Shakespeare’s eloquent prose in Hamlet that perfumes the stench of what many consider the most futile of all the 7 basic fears: the fear of death.

As a child, did you fear the dark…why?  Is fear of death a birthright; preparations for witnessing all that we love die, and replaced by a pain that only ends when we, too, are taken from those who love us?

Fear of death is fear of the unknown.   The uncertainty of what’s after life is a compelling dilemma drawing multitudes to religion.  These prescribed dogmas of prayer and faith assume insurance against fire and eternal damnation.

Empirical research proves that people with strong religious faith are the least afraid of dying.  Religious fanatics – suicide bombers by example – take the extreme and willfully obliterate walls between life and nirvana using death as a stepping-stone.  By contrast, it is proven that people lacking religious faith are the most anxious about dying.

The exceptions are non-believers – atheists, agnostics, infidels and skeptics – who consider the concept of humans possessing a supernatural soul as farcical, if not fraudulent. The irreligious and unspiritual assert that all life ends at death.  The only extension is decay or recycling into new organisms.

Science professes that all that matters is energy and matter.  Atoms and molecules form matter while light, heat, electricity and respiration create energy.   Humans are a complex universal soup of matter and energy that can’t be created, or destroyed – only transformed.  By logical conclusion, the essence of all humans is without end.

Which is your belief…faith or science?  Both make convenient coping mechanisms for managing death anxiety.  If science strips away the anxiety of mortality, and faith relieves the fear of what comes after life, what is there to fear from death?  If the question is when, then therein lies death’s true gift.

Not knowing when death will come – only that it will – engages the living in living fully in the moment.  NOW is the only force as powerful and as certain as death.

“Death is the passing of a stone through the surface of calm waters, disappearing beneath the unknown churning ripples into currents of emotion and fear for those having passed on to a place beyond the reach of our love.”   ck