Fear

The men's organization I participate in (www.mkp.org) groups all emotion into five categories: anger, sadness, joy, fear, and shame. This is useful, but I increasingly have come to believe that there are really only two fundamental emotional states: love and fear. All others are derivative to, or variations on, those two. I will go even further and speculate that love and fear may be two sides of a single state of human emotion.

I say this because I constantly struggle with one or the other of these two states of being; I either am challenged to move toward love, or challenged to remain centered in the face of fear. Is one my self-awareness, the other my shadow?

I also wonder about states of fear: I feel physical fear, for example, when I am in physical danger; and a different kind of physical fear when I speak in public. The fear of speaking to someone I care about, on a topic that is difficult, is much harder than either of them. And the fear of asking for what I need from those who might be able and willing to give it to me is the hardest of all.

Someone said that the true definition of courage is to choose love over fear. It is certainly a constant choice for me.