Tautology Tuesday Pt. 2 (Continuation from Motivation Monday!)

I am quite ill today and feeling poorly poorly poorly, so I do intend to make this quick – but I do want to get something down here! I just wanted to briefly elaborate on the idea I presented yesterday – that the fear of failure, however real (and however much it may be based in biology or not and how much of it deals with our psychological perceptions of ourselves within a social context), is nothing but a fallacy – and one we unquestionably have just to get over if we are going to really do anything “meaningful” with our lives (by our own perceptions of “meaningful.”).

I look it at it like I look at the fear of death. The fear of death is real, it is legitimate; it drives nearly all of our actions and lies behind our other fears (see yesterday’s post as well!). However, the fear of death is ALSO a fallacy – we are NOT AFRAID OF DEATH; WE ARE AFRAID OF THE SUFFERING THAT LEADS TO DEATH. It is not so much the “end” of life that I personally find scary; in fact, when I suffered greatly as a child, I found the only solace I could find in knowing that one day there would come an END to it all – that there is an emptiness somewhere, happy or empty, it doesn’t matter, that brings with it an end to the physical, mental, and emotional suffering. Some might see that as “bleak” but for me it has always been something of a “breath of fresh air;” a reminder that, as far as we know, there IS an end to the suffering somewhere down the road. Now, for me, at any rate, this does NOT diminish the impact of the death of others on me – in fact, I think I deal particularly poorly with the death of others and I am still investigating the causes of that one. But in general, I believe especially if one is a person “of faith” or a person who is an atheist, the idea of DEATH for oneself is not scary in and of itself but it is of the suffering in illness that leads to death, the things undone that become permanently undone once death approaches, the idea that we didn’t do everything we wanted to do.

And in that idea is the FACT (I will have to provide sources later) that we actually regret what we “didn’t do” more than we regret the poor choices we made. This is an interesting one because it illustrates the idea that I discussed at some length yesterday – that the only difference between ACTUAL failure and perceived failure is the somewhat contradictory inclusion of action in the definitions between “actual” and “perceived,” where “actual” means one took action and “perceived” means one failed to take action and therefore stayed at the “default state.” The regret we experience for the things we “didn’t do” is due to the mental obsession with re-living unfulfilled actions (I highly suggest the utilization of MBSR if you have trouble with these sorts of issues); it only makes sense that we regret what we didn’t do more than what we did because what we didn’t do puts us in that “default state of failure;” if we made the effort to do something but that something ended up being idiotic or ended up producing negative results, &c., at least we made the effort and took a step and LEARNED SOMETHING. This is the difference between the “default state” of failure and the state of action, the difference between a False and a True, the difference between a “0” and a “1,” &c. &c. &c.

I hope that clarified matters a little bit. I do apologize for not getting more out today; I have been quite literally sick in bed all day. I do hope you are all having a happy and healthy day wherever you are in the world! Thank you for taking the time to read this and my heart is always with YOU.

❤ Always, Beth