There’s an old saying among soldiers that no matter how much body armor you bolt on there’s always one enemy who has the upper hand in any firefight. That’s because this foe hides inside your armor. The enemy of which I speak of course, is fear. Fear. Ancient and pre-human... the most powerful of drives, hardwired directly into the marrow of the brain.
As men, our relationship with our own fear is what sets us apart from one another. Those who stand toe-to-toe with their fears and accept risks are almost always the ones that make it into the top 10% of the “high status male” scale that I slobber on about relentlessly. Just consider the panoply fears there are to overcome in life... fear of risking your ego by standing in front of an audience and speaking... of putting your life savings on the line to start a business... of going for a job interview or audition for something that’s way over your head talent-wise... of betting all your money on a single stock pick... taking a swipe at a guy who’s wronged you in some way, even though he’s stronger and likely to win the fight. And of course, fear of going up to that foxy girl over there and asking her out for coffee!
These are the fears that shape our time on earth. To the degree that we either face them down or run away fashions the template upon which the story of our life is written.
As you know I get lots of letters from my readers and some of them
incorporate important lessons that I feel should be shared. Here’s one that I got recently from a guy who was rambling on about a particular situation he was having with a woman in his class at college. He went into elaborate detail about how he happened to smile at her one day in class, and how she initially returned his smile, but then seemed to quickly look away and ignore him. This guy
became tormented over the “secret meaning” that he was convinced this single brief action on her part must’ve held. What sort of judgement had she placed on his status as a man? The letter went on and on, but there was nothing of note until I hit the part about two pages in where he mentioned his age. He was 63. Sixty-three!
A guy this old was getting all bent out of shape over the reaction of a girl that was young enough to be his grand-daughter? A two generation age gap? So I wrote back and asked him to clarify some things for me, and he sent back a long sad letter recounting numerous failings that he’d had with women all
throughout his life. Here’s a sampling of some of the things he wrote: In junior high, I took a girl to a movie, put my arm around her eventually, and she grabbed my hand and pulled it over her tit. I pulled back my hand like her tit was a hot potato! What a fool! I think it was several days later before I realized what a mistake I'd made.
I was in a car with another girl a short time later, and we
started getting cozy, but then I patted her rather roughly on the top of the head. That was the end of any more coziness with that girl!
Later in my twenties, I shared a flat with a married couple. The man went out of town for a couple weeks, and before he left, he intimated that I should make myself at home with his wife. She intimated the same thing. I had been hornier than a hoot owl, but somehow it never occurred to me to take advantage of that situation. Maybe it's just as well, because I think those things generally do not work out in the long run. But that was not my reasoning at the time. I think I was just trying to keep myself miserable.
Just trying to keep myself miserable? Some more...
In my thirties, I went into a sandwich shop where I saw one of the most beautiful women working behind the counter. I was feeling very self-confident that day, and no doubt it showed. She took my order and asked me, "What's your name?" "Richard," I answered. I thought of asking her name in return, but I stopped myself.
I couldn’t get her out of my head all that week. The next time I went in there, she held my gaze for an unusually long time. When I got to the front of the line though, I was too self-conscious to actually say anything to her, except for what kind of sandwich I wanted. The next time I saw her, she would not look at me any more.
Many of us would quickly forget this sort of nothing incident. Not so with a man who’s trapped in a endless cycle of bum luck though. Obsession with a missed opportunity still continues to haunt him. It continues:
To bring this issue more up to date, I had another opportunity not too long ago to flirt with the woman I told you about in my earlier letter. It would have been very simple and easy to speak to her as soon as I saw her, since I had something very simple and safe to say. But I guess I wanted to wait for the perfect opportunity or something. If I had just spoken to her I would have established myself as someone that talks to her, and everything would be more comfortable and I could have taken it from there. A factor is my age (63), of course. If I were younger, at least I could feel justified in inviting her to lunch or something. I am mostly interested in just flirting with her now-- I need some excitement in my life. But I need some justification, somehow.
And finally, dismally, this observation:
Too bad I waited so many years to begin this journey. I feel that I am just about ready to make a change in my attitude and aspect, but how many years do I have left now? Maybe this is the meaning of the saying, youth is wasted on the young?...
Is there anything more sad than a life of regrets? Really, is there? I excerpted this gentlemen’s letter in order to extract the lesson we all need to have driven our skulls – that we cannot remain on a treadmill of fear and expect
our lives to improve significantly beyond the limited range of possibility defined by those fears. What’s the source of your fear?... Your body (height / weight), your face, lack of sexual experience, your voice? Maybe your lack of education or social sophistication? Whatever it is, fear hides out inside your armor where it’s perfectly positioned to defeat whatever efforts you make to hide from it. It is the
Master Controller Emotion, the great, silent destroyer of our dreams. In its service you will fashion a life-long catalogue of regrets that you can review on your deathbed.
It’s disturbing to have such a pornographic spectacle of the power of fear laid out before us like this, but it’s also a necessary first step in coming to terms with it. Trepidation doesn’t grab hold of you over-night... it’s skulking and
imperceptible, built layer-upon-layer over the course of years on the backs of accumulated minor and major apprehensions. Eventually it seals your thinking into a narrow track that keeps you stuck in an endless cycle that is bound to keep producing the same old results for you.