Love and Fear

There are two fears that I live with everyday. The first is poverty. There is nothing that scares me more than poverty. I am not really worried about absolute poverty. But I am much more afraid of relative poverty. There is nothing that scares me like not having enough. Not being able to get something I want. I don't want much. But there is no worse feeling than not being able to get something you want.

So you teach yourself either to want what you have or to not want anything. There isn't much difference here. And it creates the second fear: the fear of greatness. Not greatness in being famous or anything like that, but being good. Having people respect you. Basically getting what you want and maybe even a little more.

Now the underlying issue here is work. The work it takes to be good at something is tough, especially when that something is not completely under your control. Most successes in this life are dependent on complex mix of things. Luck exists. Failure exists even with hard work. We have a lot of control of our destinies but we don't have total control over anything.

So I think we all learn that a strategy in life is to lower expectations. Life is difficult when expectations are never met. Of course this realization that expectations won't be met is part of life. Eventually you either stop caring about your failures or forget about them or lower your expectations or something.

This is life, but you can't really live looking at life in this way. You can't live if you're sitting around thinking about poverty and lowering expectation. You can't do it.


"On his right hand Billy tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear
And in which hand he held his fate was never clear
Come Indian summer he took his young lover for his bride
And with his own hands built a great house down by the riverside"