JustSo - The Monkey's Glasses

THE MONKEY'S GLASSES
By David Gewirtz, October 2, 1998

It's the fear, stupid.
It's the fear. It's not the reality.
Reality has substance, essence, experience.
Fear is ephemeral. Unreal.

Fear haunts.
Reality can't haunt.
Reality can annoy. It can piss-off.
Reality can truly, totally, tremendously suck.
Reality can make your life seem like hell.
But if you're living,
By definition, you're not in hell.

Fear is a ghost.
The curse of possibility.
The threat of impossibility,
The essence of what is not.

Reality can have promise.
Reality can have hope.
But fear, fear never can.
Fear has no future.

I spend my days carrying fear on my back,
It sometimes seems to ooze out of my very pores.
I spend my nights wallowing in it, a
Black, dingy, dire blanket of emotional pain.

Ah, pain.
True, honest, real, pain.
Pain is the negotiator between fear and reality.
Pain invites itself into both arenas.
Pain can be real.
Just strike your thumb with a hammer,
And you'll agree.

But pain can also be ghostly, emotional, unreal.
Imagined. Manufactured. Constructed.
Assembled step-by-step,
So every piece fits perfectly into a jigsaw puzzle,
The picture of, the mirror image of, the inner turmoil.

What am I trying to tell myself?
What am I trying, so incredibly, so desperately,
To persuade myself to believe?
What are the truths that we hold self-evident?

I carry fear on my back like a deranged, horrid monkey.
It colors every day, every perception, every interaction.
It holds dung-colored glasses over my eyes.
If I could see past the monkey's glasses,
Then perhaps I could see fear as it truly is.

Where today, under fear's influence,
I experience years of pain each and every minute,
I might, without those horrid glasses,
Experience only a few moments,
Or even hours,
Of pain, every so often, over the years.

Where today, I see all that could possibly go wrong,
Perhaps, I might experience, really feel it,
Actually internalize it,
When something goes right.

The reality of pain is real, without doubt.
But it is not constant. Just once in a while.
Otherwise, life just is, some good, some okay,
Much memorable in its simple normalcy.

Real pain diverts just a few grains,
Of the sands of time.
But fear, the evil monkey, magnifies those grains,
So each seems a boulder, crushing down,
Until the fear overwhelms everything else.

So what's the lesson?
What can we learn from all this?
What can fear teach us?
And how many times must we repeat this grade?

The lesson, quite simply, is this.
Fear may cost more than pain.
The effort, the hurt, the life force absorbed by fear,
May well dwarf the reality of both the pain,
And all the efforts, combined,
To actually solve life's problems.

It's ok to honor the pain, the real pain.
Because real pain is a beacon, a warning,
An indicator light on the dashboard of life.
It's right to invest in repairing, maintaining, fixing,
Turning around.

But it is wrong to honor the fear.
Fear is a detour sign to a living hell.
Fear is a laser pointer to the worst of all possibilities.
Shake off the monkey. Break the glasses.

The only thing we have to fear is not fear itself.
Fear itself must be banished.
Fear itself is the enemy.
It's time for fear to be afraid.