Jeremy C Kester

I had written the bulk of this post days ago thinking that I would not post it. It was another instance of a thought that wasn’t fully formed, that I was trying to write to grab onto an understanding of an idea. But I had a change of heart. Below is what I wrote out as I toyed with the idea of fearing failure and fearing mortality.

It seems to me we have dueling fears we must recognize and face. The first is the fear many of us know all too well. Failure. It’s the one that tells us whatever will keep us from pursuing our dreams, from doing the things that we wish to do with our lives. It drives procrastination and all kinds of other crap that keeps progress at bay.

The second fear is far more insidious, however. It hides from most of us, giving us the false impression that we have nothing to worry about. It’s our mortality. Many don’t realize that it is even there, going through life forgetting that one day we will all die. We will run out of time.

Run from the first and you accomplish little until you find yourself facing the latter. You find yourself unfulfilled, a life wasted. You believe tomorrow will always come until one day, you realize that your last tomorrow is fast approaching, too late to win today.

But you can face them both, acknowledging that death can come at any time, but until then, failure is but a result of doing what we love and learning from it. Maybe then, life can be lived.