The Mental Health Digest - An Emotion Greater Than Fear

An Emotion Greater Than Fear

By Jordan Brown • Issue #185 •

Reading Time: 2 minutes, 13 seconds

Fear drives the world.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Fear runs the media.

And it’s because fear is a powerful emotion.

But there is something greater than fear, something that you can cultivate right now.

An Anniversary of Fear

Yesterday was the anniversary of my open-heart surgery.

Eight years ago on June 7th, I had heart surgery to repair a faulty aortic valve. Thinking back to that time eight years ago, one of the predominant emotions I had was fear. It gripped me and colored my worldview.

How could it not? you might be wondering.

It’s true. There are moments in life that seem objectively terrifying. Many people are going through such moments right now.

But do these moments have to be terrifying? Isn’t there something else that could overcome the powerful, often debilitating, emotion that is fear?

Something Greater Than Fear

There is something greater than fear, and that emotion is love.

Love need not be sappy. It need not be any way at all. As long as it overcomes, it’s love.

Let me explain.

How do you know that you love something or someone? Do you fill out a formula with all the right variables and then you have love? No. There is no formula for it. Either you feel it or you don’t. You just know when it’s there.

Before my heart surgery, I could have stopped and decided I was too terrified to move forward. There were times that I considered it.

What got me through? Love. From my girlfriend-now-wife. From my family. From deep down in what I knew one day I could become.

I knew I needed to fix my heart to have it carry me through one day. To this day. And so I pushed through the fear not knowing what the outcome would be, but knowing that there had to be something on the other side.

The World You Live In

And so it is for you. You can cultivate love in your life. It’s necessary because it’s the antidote to what ails us. Without it, the world seems dark. With it, love strikes the right balance–and we can all move forward again.

This is your task for today. Find love in the small things, in the simple actions. Take a step forward. And then one more. If you don’t feel it at first, ease up on the way that you’re moving. You don’t need to doggedly pursue love. In fact, it works better if you don’t. Like a rainbow that appears when you least expect it, you can’t force love and its corollary emotions to appear.

You need to set the stage for it. You need to roll out the carpet and prepare for its arrival.

Then, when the curtain comes up, suddenly, it’s there.

I hope you have a joyful start to your week. You deserve it.

Jordan

P.S. Here’s the final version of the cover for my first book, In Search of Happiness. It’s a mental health poetry book, and I’m so happy with how it turned out.

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By Jordan Brown

The Mental Health Update is a weekly email newsletter that makes mental health meaningful and accessible.

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The Mental Health Digest - An Emotion Greater Than Fear

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