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The Truth About Fear

Fear — convincing as it may seem — is actually a conceptual mistake.

What is there to be afraid of anyway? Fear is always future based. We fear what might happen later. The past is gone, so there’s no point in being afraid of it. If past traumas cause fear in us, it is only because we fear that the traumatic event will reoccur. That’s what trauma is — wounding caused by a past event that makes us chronically fearful about the future and, therefore, queasy in the present. But the future doesn’t exist now, in the present, [which is] the only moment in which we are ever alive.

Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow; Notes and Reflections from a Life of Zen