This idea is so important. I cannot even begin to express how important this is. The world is shrouded in a deep sense of fear that drives everyone, and the idea expressed in the quote above is to let the fear go, let go of the “headaches” and just allow yourself to live, to be comfortable and “at home” with the world around you. There is so much fear in the world and it is tearing the people living in it to shreds, slowly and steadily tearing away the layers until they are nothing but a raw nerve scared to step outside the boundaries of what they know. Many people say that humans are guided by a sense of accomplishment, or the sense of adventure, always pushing forward always moving faster trying to get somewhere for some reason or another, but in all reality there is so much of the world that is guided purely by fear.

The world is so terrified by the unknown it has covered itself in walls and in armor in order to protect itself from what it does not understand. The core of fear lies there, in the unknown. Countries go to war over miscommunication and misunderstandings. People are scared of that which they do not understand. People have a tendency to lash out and to destroy what they cannot explain, because the inability to put a face and a name and an identity on things is the most terrifying thing a person will ever experience. This fear is a basic and primal instinct in people. To those who wish to rise above the fear, knowledge is the answer. The more you know the less is a mystery and the less there is to be afraid of; but humanity’s knowledge of the world is still incomplete. The unknown is still out there and that causes to people to become scared; and it is this fear that is killing us.

Examples are everywhere. Sexuality has an ever changing and ever growing definition today, and because many people do not understand it, they fear it, which in turn leads to a backlash of terrified people screaming about what is right in their small world. Terrorism is a threat every day and this scares people so deeply they form barriers against compassion and dehumanize a person because of their skin tone or their religion. Scared people will resort to unimaginable things to save what they believe and to keep from becoming more scared. If you challenge someone’s beliefs, they do not fight you on it because they believe so intensely, they will fight you because if their beliefs are wrong then the foundation they have built their life upon is false and what does that mean for them? It is fear that causes a closed mind and a guarded heart.

 We are such a fragile species, much more breakable than we would like to admit, but keeping such fear so close to the chest and closing ourselves to understanding others is what causes such fragility. If a person tenses before an impact, the damage is so much worse than the damage on a person who let themselves relax into it. The openness of the mind is the only thing to save the world from the fear so deeply rooted inside us. The hatred is cause by fear which stems from misunderstanding. If only everyone would open themselves to attempt some sort of empathy for those around us, rather than being so caught up in our own fear, the world could be a place where people don’t kill themselves or others so often. Maybe if everyone gave a damn about each other there wouldn’t be such a high rate of divorce in America, or so many depressed kids struggling to get out of bed in the morning.

  There is nothing on this Earth I feel more strongly about than the damage that fear has done to the world and how easy it would be for everyone to just open their minds in the smallest degree. Everyone is so scared all the time; scared of living, of dying, scared of unfulfilled dreams, scared of everything because that’s all they know, that they do not see the beauty of the world or appreciate the fact that there is so much love and so much to love. Because fear is prevalent but so is love and if people would possibly attempt to feel one more than the other everything would be just a little less scary. I know that I’m not the only person on the planet to feel this way, who lives in spite of fear rather than for it, but you asked for something about me that the applications couldn’t tell you. Well, this is it. This is everything I am and everything I aspire to be. My goal is to live not without fear, but above it, acknowledging and hopefully overcoming the discrimination and hatred so deeply ingrained the human psyche. It is so incredibly cliché, but my hope is that my time on earth will have been spent spreading a little understanding, a little love, rather than the perpetuation of fear, and if I succeed, it will have been time well spent.