The Fear of Action by Tim Walter
The fear of action is the sort of fear that paralyses a rabbit in the headlights. That’s an image we are familiar with. There is also the physiological effect of fear in humans that swamps the brain to such an extent that the person simply cannot react in an emergency and we are literally stunned into inaction. People freeze in terror. It’s common for those unfortunates caught in disastrous accidents like stricken ships to simply be unable to move, even when shouted at and slapped to “bring them round.”
Lesser fear can paralyze us into inaction in daily life too. We can find we are trapped in confusion, unable to make decisions about even the simple things in life because the issues which seem like the really big frightening ones are too frightening and scary to even contemplate tackling. The little ones take their place on our mental action list, but still we remain frozen in our fear.
Before my wife and I moved to North Yorkshire we had in our garden a large stone topped table made by a local artist in the Forest of Dean. On it he had carved the words “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight there rises the laughter of children” as an homage to TS Elliot’s “Burnt Norton” poem from “Four Quartets” (which incidentally is a wonderful piece about time).
When the aging artist was working on this six foot stone chiselling and hammering it into shape it suddenly shifted and fell onto him, pinning his legs to the ground. Looking at the hospital X rays it was easy for the doctors to see the broken bones in the artist’s pelvis but they also noticed something that had previously gone undiagnosed: his enlarged prostate. Subsequent tests revealed he had cancer which was then managed successfully thereafter.
However, the trauma for this gentle man was such that he didn’t want to go near that unfinished stone in case a similar accident should occur. Despite the positive outcome of discovering and managing the cancer which otherwise could have been fatal for the him his fear of the “what if” prevented him from completing the piece.
So when my wife and I spotted the partly worked but rejected curved stone hiding beneath a tarpaulin in the corner of his garden and asked what it was, he was reluctant to show us. We insisted because we were looking for something striking to commemorate the passing of my wife’s father, Brian. He had been a gregarious man whose desire for moral correctitude led him to work in helping maladjusted children, “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight …..” was an utterly appropriate quote.
He saw the relevance and realised his fears were, in his words, “probably unfounded.” In the end, he delighted in finishing the piece and that stupendous table was a feature of many hours of fun and convivial conversation on many of our Summer evenings. Just the sort of thing Brian loved.
Often the things we fear the most are those things that could “probably” go wrong and make us appear failures… like crushing one’s pelvis with a tonne of stone.
Sometimes those “failures” bring with them magnificent opportunities too.
Click here for Tim’s article Ages In Chaos
Reprinted by kind permission of Tim Walter at www.knightsrose.com. Writing scripts, making television programmes and producing conferences since the early eighties, Tim’s life changed dramatically when he and his family moved to a large Georgian townhouse in the Forest of Dean, England. There were many strange things that occurred in that house as it transpired all that was required were the services of a dowser, something Tim had never heard of at the time.
Tim was fortunate to work with the great late Hamish Miller who became Tim’s mentor during the last 7 years of his life before passing in 2010. Today Tim lives in North Yorkshire and is a transformational life coach using Personal Subtle Energy Management, a Geomancer and EFT practitioner. He uses these intuitive tools to help people change their realities so they live as their fullest selves at peace in their own worlds.
Tim runs workshops on psychic development, dowsing, meditation and mindfulness, and gives talks on the power of our subjective realities to heal the self.