Admitting my fears

I woke up from a bad dream earlier this afternoon. In it, I lived alone in a cramped flat, not at all the spacious home I share with my wife and daughter. The room is badly lit, as if shoved into a dark corner of a tenement building where little sunlight can seep through. There were cabinets set up everywhere, making the whole place a labyrinth even in its crampedness.

I was in one of the inner rooms when a stranger with dyed red hair appeared. I felt insecure, invaded, threatened. I knew this person had malicious intent: to steal, maybe? To murder?

I tried my best to hide a wall but when I looked, there we were, staring at each other through either side of a small glass paned window. His left eye was completely white and blind.

He stood there, motionless, as if trying to watch how I'd react. His defiant stillness was almost mocking my apparent lack of courage. He slowly turned to walk away. That's when I ran. I wanted to catch him. But he was out before I could get to him in the labyrinthine maze of the small room.

Then I woke up.

The dream led me to thinking about my worst fears. What are the things I am most afraid of? Would it be the safety of my household? That someone in the middle of the night would break in and harm my family while I was away at work? I keep telling Veck to keep the porch light on through the night but she's so stubborn. Is it the fear that Dana would go through the same horrors I did when I was a teenager?

Then I realized what my real fears were. I am afraid Veck and I would have a quarrel so bad she would pack up and leave. That I'll never see Dana again. I am afraid Veck would find another man. And worse, be happier with the other person.

I'm afraid to live alone, a once-married man, and suddenly wrenched out of my most precious relationships into a lonely bachelorhood. I guess, in this way, I am afraid to be my Dad. My Mom left us when we were young. I was afraid history would repeat. I guess pain seared in the hearts and minds of the very young do last a lifetime.

They say it's good to face your fears. To embrace them. To accept them as part of who you are.

A close friend of mine will go under the knife on 29 July this year. They found a cyst in her ovary and they have to take it out. She's had this same operation before. But that doesn't make things easier for her. She said she's afraid to be put to sleep during the surgery. I asked why. She said she's afraid she won't wake up.

My friend is a single mom. Her son is two years old. Suddenly I'm glad I don't have to be onstage on 29 July, trying to pretend to be happy when in the back of my mind I'm thinking about the operation.

Buddhism teaches we're all impermanent. Christianity teaches that Heaven and earth will pass away, but not God's Word that says we were created for eternity. In between impermanence and eternity we all live our lives through the sorrows and suffering and senselessness of our fears, imagined or real. Arthur Koestler said, "Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears."