Handle The Hissing Fear

Fear is what happens when reality collides with our personal fiction.

Lama Tsonly
*********************
I avoid fear as much as I can. Fear has the strength to alter our lives by focusing the mind on negatives until they become realities. "The thing I greatly feared has come upon me" wrote Job. If we aren't careful we can manufacture the thing we are afraid of. But if that is not the cause of our fear then the fear itself must be challenged and the thing we are afraid of must be taken up and handled until its fangs are removed,

When I retired, like most retirees, I looked forward to a life of ease, a cessation of troubles and having my days spent doing the things I enjoy most. Well let me tell you that turned out to e a personal fiction. I don't want to start every day by rolling up my sleeves and taking on the task of fixing my life, But that is what I find myself doing most of the time.

If I had the eye sight and strength of a 25 year old my normal day of reckoning, rearranging, searching, maintaining, stomping my feet and settling things wouldn't be so daunting.

I do eventually get to do some of the things I enjoy but it seems I have to win the opportunity every day. Who would believe it? There's a price tag on retirement. One of the marauding influences against a calm and peaceful retirement is the opinion from the outside, working world that since I am retired I have all kinds of free time on my hand to loll around and indulge myself in whimsical maneuvers. Ha! Do my clocks run faster than anyone else's? No? Then where does it go, out the window when I'm not looking?

The only answer I can find, and it seems to be a good one, (are you taking notes) is to get ahead of the fictions. My imagination, which never rests, is responsible for some of the most flaming fantasies. I'm going to get right up and start a business. Today!

By the time I visit the bathroom, wash off what the sand man has left on my face and make a cup of coffee, my fictions have been reduced to a more appropriately senior citizen level. It is then that I recall the unseen things, the work left undone, the obligations I have somehow accumulated and the dangers of the world at large, creditors still circling around and snarling, certain parts of the body here and there that are not behaving right and must be look at, and, of course, during my, at last, sleep I forgot all the things I'm supposed to worry about. They comer hissing back.

What is this retirement thing I've heard so much about? Something AARP dreamt up to fool us old geezers? The opponents of Social Security (just wait until there are no chips on their side of the table) complain that old folks are living longer. Of course we are. We can't fold up, because we're out having fisticuffs with the wicked world at large. I collect Social Security and two pensions and I live a simple life. So why don't I have any money left at the end of the month? "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where (low interest rates and variable mortgages) doth corrupt and where (banks and credit companies) break through and steal." A word to the wise and the otherwise.

Do I fear? You bet I do. But I put on my sturdy L L Bean boots and go kick fear in the butt, every day.

Dana Bate
The Vagabond
******************
SUMMER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)

Who are the 2 (two) most important people alive today? Why?

Only 6 responses so far.

dbdacoba@aol.com

Thank you.
DB
********************