Facing our fears
It's been said our fears are the monsters we believed were under the bed when we were children.*
I don't remember being particularly scared of monsters under my bed as a child. Maybe that had something to do with sharing a room with my brother when we were very little. Being the one on the top bunk, the only thing that was under my bed back then was my younger brother in the lower bunk, and whilst we didn't always get on, I wouldn't call him a monster!
Then when I was a little older and graduated to having my own room, my bed was one of those double mattress affairs, and there wasn't any space under the bed for a monster to live - unless it was a very small monster, or an only an inch high, and a one-inch high monster wouldn't have scared me because it would have been so much smaller than me.
So I don't remember being scared of monsters under my bed. What I do remember was a sense of being not quite perfect, and always wanting to get things right. This was not a helpful approach to life, since, as I've said before 80% is distinction, and this belief that if I couldn't do something perfectly I didn't want to play meant I would sit on the sidelines and watch other people being messy and imperfect, and learning how to do the things I wanted to do, such as learn to swim or drive a car. Eventually I did learn to do both of these things, but looking back now I wonder how many other things I could have learned if I'd not spent so much time wanting to be perfect at them, and if I'd just started sooner.
Perhaps this fear of not being good enough, of not being perfect was my monster under the bed. In the same way as I would sit on the sidelines and watch, over time I didn't just believe there was a monster under the bed, I didn't even want to step off and walk past the bed the way a child might cautiously tiptoe past to avoid being noticed by the monster. Ever find yourself trapped in the bathroom with a spider because you're waiting for it to move out of the way? And how long are we prepared to wait for that spider to move rather than take a deep breath, reach for a single moment of courage and step past it?
And if we allow that fear of the monster under the bed to persist unchecked, without taking a deep breath, reaching for that moment of courage, and checking under the bed, we can find ourselves marooned on our island bed, stuck in our rooms, waiting and relying on other people to come to us. We can end up living our lives in just one place, a very limited space, and miss out on so much.
Much better to check under the bed, verify for ourselves whether there even is a monster under the bed, and if there is something there, then we can decide what help we may need to handle it. And the only way to do that is to switch on the light, and look for our fears. It only takes a minute to check so we can decide what to do. If we decide we do need help, then we can call on someone to help us handle it; and if it turns out it was in our imagination all along, we can climb down off the bed and cross the floor, to open the door and step outside, into the world.
The question is, what's really under the bed?
Lynn
* (unknown)
* (unknown)
