Eight Fears

Okay, another one for a prompt from my tribe of blogging friends!

Eight Fears:

I fear (in no particular order):

1. Choking
2. Rats and mice-I was told last week they are really two different animals but in my mind they are all the same. It is that long skinny that really grosses me out. We have a rat lab in our psychology department. I have to order the baby rats. When they arrive (usually via a slightly chubby and out of breath UPS man who has traipsed across campus carrying this box of critters), if the right people are there, they come out of their office and coo over the baby rats. Occasionally they open the box and pick the rats up and cuddle on them. I try to stay pretty much out of sight when this is going on. And I am careful about admitting how scary they are to me because this is the psych dept and if you let them know you are scared of something, they will try to desensitize you to your fear. I don’t want to be desensitized because that would mean I would have to come into close contact with a rat.
3. Anger
4. Unhappiness-I don’t want any of my family to be unhappy and I spent years trying to keep that from happening. Guess what? It did not work.
5. Spiders
6. Being rear ended-There was a time frame of about a year and a half where I was rear ended THREE times. The last time totaled my car and I had to be hauled away in an ambulance. They were trying to lift me out of the car and my dress got hung on something and was holding me back and Lord, I thought they were going to pull my dress off my body. I can now give a really mean "get off my a**" look if someone is following me too closely. It always impresses me when they clearly get my message and back off a bit because I am not usually a commanding person.
7. Ambulance rides-They strapped me down too tight and I had to threaten to go crazy on them if they did not at least loosen the strap around my feet a teeny tint bit. I must have been convincing because they loosen the strap. A teeny tiny bit.
8. Undignified situations-such as being pulled out of a car by hunky ambulance men and getting hung up, making it look like you were almost too heavy for them to lift.

Wow, I made it to eight! I might not have been finished with my list!

One of my bigger, most serious fears (that I am working on) is the fear of there not being enough for me. I am trying to break the mindset of thinking in terms of scarcity. I am trying to call forward my own sufficiency (and what I am talking about is way bigger than money).

That makes me think of this quote I copied from someone else's blog a while back:

Lynne Twist wrote this, it's from her book The Soul of Money--

"For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying that we don't have enough of. . .We don't have enough exercise. We don't have enough work. We don't have enough profits. We don't have enough power. We don't have enough wilderness. We don't have enough weekends. Of course, we don't have enough money--ever.

We're not thin enough, we're not smart enough, we're not pretty enough or fit enough or successful enough, or rich enough--ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack. . .What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life. . .

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances." ---Lynne Twist