I am reading Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry. I just love her tone and voice: humble, smart, curious, honest. She writes about facing fears and worries about our world and our own insecurities.
When writing about courageous people she has met, people who might appear to us as existing without fear or insecurities, she says that none of them would call themselves fearless; rather, they have developed an ability to live with jeopardy, to remain balanced and able to think clearly in the presence of jeopardy. “They’ve learned how to be comfortably afraid.”
Maintaining a state of being comfortably afraid seems to me like the only sane and productive way to function in this world. You’d be crazy not to be afraid of a whole slew of things, but if you let those fears paralyze you and prevent you from being comfortable, you’ll never be able to help anyone, including yourself.
So, yeah, here’s to being comfortably afraid.
My Corner of the Village 