To Act is to Risk Failure. To Not Act is to Ensure It.

Perfect love casts out all fear. Does perfect fear cast out all love? Consider, how can you love what you fear?

Actually, I have a relationship like that. I love to write. Only I become afraide every time that I contemplate doing so. I fear that I will have nothing to say; that I whatever I am to say, I won't say well; that I can't finish. I will go out of my way not to write, despite my having held jobs for the past seven years in which writing was a major component. Still, fear creeps in.

Fear came up during a This American Life broadcast this week, which was a clip show of popular segments from old shows. The segment featured a couple zines written by a guy with some kind of mental disability. The zines were about his fears. He detailed his fears in language as ungrammatical as it was effective. In fact, its "outsider" language and word choice made the fears seem all the more real. Some of the fears were funny, "fear of the Rugrats being taking off the air," while others stripped off my ironic amusement, "fear that a friend who travels to other countries might come back not able to understand English" or "fear that if he go into the library and get 7 or 8 books and somehow while reading his voice going from low to high."

My fears are no less byzantine: "fear of my boss disapproving of what I do and telling me of that disapproval whenever I see her;" "fear of not being a good father by neither encouraging my kids to read the Bible nor talking about Jesus enough;" or "fear of not being able to actually follow through on anything I say that I'll do."

Fear paralyzes me, but I know that I'm not alone in this. It's a deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction. In the face of not knowing what to do, we do nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing at which we have failed. In response to fear, I do something else, something I am sure that I can achieve: send an e-mail, rake the yard, make a phone call, or bake cookies.

The result: I'm so afraid that I might fail that I ensure it by doing nothing or doing something so late (though well) that the end is superceded by the quality of means.

As an antidote, I recently came across a quote by John Henry Newman: "Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."

To act is to risk failure. To not act is to ensure it.

A caveat: I would say that to do nothing IS sometimes the best action to a problem that will most likely work itself out, particularly when my kids are involved. I find that most of their arguments, for instance, are solved without my intervention. The difference is to question whether not acting is out of good judgement or fear. It's easy to rationalize our fears, after all.

Consider terrorism, which has killed people, including Americans. To fear it seems prudent. Out of our fear, we support action to rid us of the threat of terror. But is it not like fearing a deadly storm? It may strike, and probably will, but no one knows when or where, for sure. Do we plan for that or live our lives regardless? Can we do both?

More on this later . . .