Someone once said that all pain is fear, and all fear is fear of loss, and I think that’s largely true. There are great many things I have wanted to do in my life which I postponed doing because of the fear I felt of the changes that accomplishing those things would bring. The problem was, postponing the potential fear also meant postponing the accomplishment. There are a lot of valid reasons to choose to do things just as there are a lot of valid reasons to choose not to do them — but fear should not be one of those reasons. Change is sometimes difficult, and often can be painful — but the world is going to move forward regardless of what you have chosen to do or postpone doing. And if you postpone doing, because of fear, you postpone being, because what you are pushing aside is your own desire, your own drive, and your own potential.

Some of my greatest regrets have come about because I postponed accomplishing things out of fear, in favor of the complacency of the moment. I thought I was living in the moment, and planning for a better future — when what I was doing was in fact the exact opposite. I was draining the moment of its power and potential by focusing my energy and attention on planning for the future that would never come, because it was always being pushed back out of fear. But doing things, living things, choosing and being in the living moment, all build that future through accomplishment. Those things all contribute to that ideal future, that ideal state of being, because they are all active choices to make it happen and bring that ideal person you have dreamed of becoming into the eternal now. Your ideal self is found not in postponing those choices, but in doing the things that the ideal person you imagine is possible would do, and doing them here, now, today. Then doing it again, each day. Every day. And in less time then you imagined, you’ll realize that ideal isn’t a dream anymore — and the future you feared turned out to be exactly the one you hoped for.