From time-to-time, I’ll share quotes with you in areas that really impact me and others I come in contact with. Fear has been a really big theme lately with clients and friends. I really like this quote on Fear by poet, Audre Lorde, in her book A Burst of Light: and Other Essays (and from brain pickings).
“Seventeen days before she turned fifty, and six years after she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer, Lorde was told she had liver cancer. She declined surgery and even a biopsy, choosing instead to go on living her life and her purpose, exploring alternative treatments as she proceeded with her planned teaching trip to Europe. In a diary entry penned on her fiftieth birthday, Lorde reckons with the sudden call to confront the ultimate fear:
I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change. I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me. Jettison cargo.”
Here is another quote from her:
“Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions. How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me…”
