Stories with fearless heroes are guaranteed to be forgettable. Fear serves the literary purpose of bringing the protagonist to that place of “emptiness, exhaustion and dread” about which I spoke in my previous post. Fear brings the hero to that very necessary full-stop, where she has no choice but to surrender her tired old strategies. But don’t take my word for it – here’s what a Buddhist nun living in Nova Scotia says about fear:
“Anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point…that’s when our understanding goes deeper.”
Her name is Pema Chodron, and this next quote is music to my ears, trying as I have, lately, to prove the advantages of adversity:
“If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”
Who’d have thought that my literary lessons were imbedded in Buddhist thought?
Not for the first time, I have Seth Godin’s blog to thank for a timely link, this time to Chodron in a new e-mag called Fear.less. Truly religious people like Chodron are always iconoclastic, turning our conventional logic on its head.
“No one ever tells us to stop running from fear,” she says. “We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear.”
We’re more likely to be given soothing words or even drugs – but Chodron reminds us that dissociating from fear comes quite naturally to us. What we really ought to do – and what the best story protagonists do – is to hold our ground. Heroes don’t run away. They risk burning in the present moment. It’s a risk that’s guaranteed to pay off in fiction, and even more so in real life.
“The most heartbreaking thing of all,” says Chodron, “is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.”
I should end there, but there’s no harm in leaving you with a few more words from Pema Chodron:
“So the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear. When I was first married, my husband said I was one of the bravest people he knew. When I asked him why, he said because I was a complete coward but went ahead and did things anyhow.”