We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live life fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating, and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. — Herbert A. Otto
I welcome 2008 into my life with a grateful heart knowing that I have lead and will continue to lead an interesting life, and have met and will continue to meet interesting people. When I was a younger man I could be heard often saying that I could die even then knowing that I had led an interesting life.
But then something happened, I traded adventure for security, and the only result from that was allowing fear to creep into my life. This began a period of my life where I experienced crippling bouts of anxiety, and I was in constant fear of dying.
As I sit here I recall many nights where I had laid in a hospital emergency bed with my heart rate through the roof, doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with me, me just knowing that I was dying. The fear began to rule my life and I allowed it to make all my decisions never traveling further than the front porch for over a month. This fear became so strong that I couldn’t go to sleep, I just knew that if I closed my eyes I would never wake up. I ended up in the hospital due to exhaustion and I was admitted to the psych ward.
This was a very bleak period of my life, I was in and out of the hospital and spent well over ninety days behind the lock doors of a special ward, but that couldn’t compare with the prison walls the fear built around me. What it took for me to break free from this crippling fear was quite simple really.
I was lying in a bed in the emergency room dying, again, when I came to realize that there was no reason to fear dying because I was already dead. I sure wasn’t living, my life had completely stopped. It was then that I decided I would take control from there on, I was tired of dying, it was once again time to live.
My journey didn’t end there, I have spent the last eight years trying to find the path that I was on and continue my journey. I think I have found it, the signs are definitely there, life is definitely interesting again.
