-Gilette commercial
I have just stumbled onto a great Canadian sitcom/drama called Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays. It only ran for one year, in 2011, but it is a fantastic show.
The show is about fears and dependance. In a nutshell, that is the premise. There is much more to it, but for the purposes of this blog, that is all you need to know. If you get a chance to watch it, I encourage you to do that. It is tremendously written, acted and the photography is spectacular for a low budget TV series.
I stumbled onto it by accident, but most of us know there are no accidents in life, only unexplained events that happen for a reason. I had begun to write the rest of this blog long before I wrote what you just read above. The show just came along, for whatever reason there are reasons for things and it just puts it all in perspective.
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Day after day, I make a plan. I know I have to get motivated. I need to get stuff done. I have things I need, I want, I have to get done. And as daylight approaches night, I know another day has passed and I didn't even come close to getting them done. And..I don't seem to give a fuck.
Fear.
It's a strange thing.
For the most part, I have none. Sure, I have the rational, healthy fears. I don't walk into fires. I don't start fights with bodybuilders who can kick my ass. I don't drive at ridiculously excessive speeds.
I am not afraid of elevators, or airplanes or any possibility that I will be the unlucky one who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have always had the sense that it won't happen to me. I never worry, really, about anything. There are reasons for that, rooted in my childhood, but safe to say, I just simply have no fear of any of these things and I likely never will.
However, I have the opposite problem to most. I have basically no fear. I am, for lack of a better term, fearless. And...that is not a good thing. It sounds good, some may wish they were that way, but I can tell you that it isn't. A lack of fear can be a sign of a lack of motivation. In my case, it is exactly that.
While fear can sometimes drive people to do things they shouldn't, it can also drive some to do some things they should. Almost everyone has the fears that drive them to do the things they shouldn't. They act irrationally and then regret that they make decisions and take actions based on fear of things that actually will never happen or effect them. I almost never do that.
What I do have is not any fear, even the healthy fear. Like the fear that my immense talent is going to be wasted because I will die one day and not achieve the things I should and want to. Fear that I am so unmotivated that all the great ideas, and stories and inventions I have stored up in my mind and lying around on pieces of paper scattered all over the place will just be pieces of paper scattered all over the place. They will never be more than that.
I am 48 in 4 months. I am not 18 anymore. I should be fearful that time is running out on me. There is still time--lots of time--but less time. And I am wasting time. That should scare me. I should be fearful of that. Anybody would be fearful of that. I am not. But I should be. I am certainly aware of it, but it has never bothered me or scared me. Almost like I know I will get it done at some point, because I always get things done when push comes to shove. But there is no push here and no one, most certainly myself, is shoving me.
Recently, Steven King has written a story about the JFK shooting and crafted that into a novel. A what-if scenario. What if JFK was not shot? What if he lived? What are all the sorts of things that would happen, that would change history? How could you write a story and make all that happen? I had that idea for a story more than 20 years ago. I worked on it, then just let it sit, going back to it periodically every so often, but never really doing anything with it.
Now, it is basically a retread idea. It has been done now.
That should really bother me. I should be very fearful that all my great story ideas are going to go the way of this one. But I am not.
But, I should be.
I need to be fearful and let that fear drive me to perform, and create.
Fear.
I need to be fearful.
In the random course of events in life that are never really random, the Steven King novel was pointed out to me just before I discovered Michael Tuesdays and Thursdays. It should scare me that that happened and that didn't scare me at first. I think it is a sign. It is starting to scare me, so maybe that is a good sign.
Maybe.
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