Fear. Less. Giving a F*ck, and not. Shift. Your. Thinking.

I have written lightly about ‘living exponentially’ in my blog post about Walter Mitty – but this post is something different. Despite there being plenty of perfectly rational things in my life to be concerned about, however naïve or ridiculous of me it might be, I am not a worrier. I really don’t possess fears. I have this un-erring belief that everything will be ‘just fine’. I have friends that I drive absolutely bonkers over this attitude of mine. Why aren’t you worried? What’s your plan? Plan. Plan. Plan. You aren’t REALLY going to write that, are you?? You aren’t really going to send that email, are you? Let go of it. I most certainly am, primarily because I care. There are far worse things.

And, like my girlfriend Mary who has experienced much of the same, there are always going to be people who want to ‘fix me’ ‘help me’ or somehow ‘rescue me’ and I am having none of it (neither, thankfully, is she). I dedicate this blog post to Mary, and her journey of self because we can’t walk in anyone else’s shoes and everything we carry with us is about reconciling our pasts so that our souls can accomplish their objectives for living in this lifetime. I only ask that Light and Love surround her and keep her safe.

I dislike high places. I have an inner ear ‘thing’ from damage caused by repeated ear infections as a child that gives me a wicked case of vertigo but I am not necessarily afraid of heights. So much of the lens in which we are viewed by the world around us, by our colleagues and our friends, and very often how we view ourselves, is a powerful catalyst for our continued behaviours – whatever they might be. A refrain of my life was repeated (yet again) fairly recently. It’s a huge compliment to be told that someone perceives you as being fearless and that because of their perception of you they are pushing away the boundaries of their fears, to fear ‘less’; three people expressed the same in a matter of two days. Respect for danger, preparation to face it squarely, has absolutely nothing to do with fear or worry. Fear is a choice. Worry is a choice.

We all have things that we have cognition of but that we (largely) keep hidden; fear of offending, fear of failure, fear of others thinking us foolish, fear of dangerous situations. These fears are not necessarily bad things but they can be debilitating things. Fear is always having a monkey on your back. Fear keeps us from fully living.

I function best from the realms of authenticity and love. That expressed, I vividly recall my father saying “I don’t care if you like me, as long as you respect me” (generally directed as dinner table conversation about people not in the room). Close friends can attest that as a result of my having been bullied from the 3rd grade onward by boys with the names of Joe and Victor (amongst others) I have honed my fathers’ attitude to ‘I don’t much care if you like me or respect me’, please just leave me alone and, if you can’t for some inexplicable reason respect polite boundaries, I assure you that you will simply ‘cease to exist’ (I have found that indifference is the greatest survival skill ever learned). Which is why in reading Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck yesterday I was like, well “Hell Yes!”

Now, most of you who know me in real life know that while I might “think it” and “act it” and “truly don’t” I also VERY RARELY actually use the word. Which is what made my Croatian-American friend Bruce’s “Croatians using the word…” tutorial back in late January (2015) very funny to me. Evidently, if a Croatian says IN CROATIAN F*ck You (or was it ‘off’?) it is actually 100x more offensive than the English use of noun, verb, adjective, expletive F*ck You. Who knew???!! So, TO EVERY ONE I LOVE, and the things I passionately care about (and you witness by not just my words but by my actions) it’s true, it’s true, it’s true – I do not give a F*ck if some unknown dweeb is challenged by my attitude to let it all fall where it should, and TO HELP IT GET THERE faster if need be. Because quite frankly my choosing to care, my giving a F*ck is one of the things I am most proud of about me. So when something is totally F*cked up expect me to do something and say something and take no prisoners in the process (though it might be an iron fist in a lovely velvet glove making it nearly impossible to distinguish what is actually happening). If that makes you uncomfortable then it is patently clear you will never be worthy of my respect or my giving a F*ck about you or your indifferent little life. I challenge you to CARE about stuff, about life, passionately. No regrets. No ‘what’s in for me’. Don’t try to control everything, or anything – it’s impossible to do so – but show up for life. Truly. Caring about what the wrong people think, SMH. And for someone that is deeply rooted in creating branding and identities, this might seem contrary but it seems more reckless to me to be fearful of opinions and perceptions of the great unwashed masses rather than functioning from a position of authenticity and integrity.

Mr. Manson is spot on. Don’t “give your F*cks away” to the wrong people and situations. Don’t worry about the inconsequential – will whatever it is matter tomorrow or the next day? Fear is an extension of giving a F*ck about the wrong things. Shift. Your. Thinking.

If you enjoy my blog please consider ‘buying me a cup of tea’ in your currency via PayPal to livelikeadog@gmail.com and then, please do share the blog with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

Which Walter Mitty Are You?

FYI – The following is NOT a movie review – 😉

Christmas Day Evening: 7:30 PM at the Cineplex with my girlfriend Jennifer Sertl to see on opening day (something I rarely do) The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Humor me, click here and open a new window to listen to this while reading! 

Walter Mitty is the ‘Negative Assets Manager’ which, while I think was cheekily poking fun at the derivatives market and the sub-prime housing crash, is quite literally what Ben Stiller’s character does – he takes care of the photographic assets (the negatives) that made Life magazine so special; even as his character initially is seen to be largely invisible – the grey toned, transparent and shadowed version, the negative, of a potentially dynamic and colourful, person.  Walter’s title is so fitting because it’s also the perfect analogy to the malaise of what most of humankind is actually experiencing – caught up in soulless jobs where corporate merger and acquisition teams squeeze the last drop of humanity from us while we stare at bank accounts and balance sheets with seemingly insufficient funds or go searching for some eternal truth and wind up missing the actual living of life.  Ben Stiller said, “What I liked about Steve’s (Conrad) script was the idea that Walter wasn’t really imagining himself as someone else, he was imagining a better version of himself.”  And that, more than the gorgeous cinematography or that Stiller actually did most of his own skateboarding down the twisty-turny road in Iceland, is what I loved about the movie – watching Walter discover the best version of himself (and, of course in doing so, finding himself worthy of love).

So much of our contemporary experience relies upon crutches to prop up ourselves to get ‘get through’ instead of really experiencing life. All the minutiae and excuses, the failure to step outside of our comfort zone and stretch ourselves as far as we possibly can – I don’t believe it is the fear of failing as much as it is hesitancy against the pervasive peer pressure to not draw undue attention to ourselves in seeming too assertive in expressing our wants or our possibilities. I am sure every culture has some variation of this but, in Sweden the word Lagom, in the context of societal behavior, means “to blend in appropriately”.  We become every variation of beige, taupe and grey living in a state of lagom. I’d like to apply Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s widely, otherwise attributed, quote from her article published in American Quarterly in 1976 entitled Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735 to my stream of consciousness here: “Well-behaved women (or men) seldom make history; …”

Prayer flags at Panboche, photo by Martin Edstrom

History isn’t always about academic study, or being noteworthy against the billions of humans who have lived or will yet live, history is made up of our stories, about the experiences small and great that define us, the choices we make to discover or to reinvent ourselves, to create value and meaning, history is always based in a personal set of experiences.

I enjoyed Walter Mitty sufficiently to see it again and it isn’t because I am a huge fan of Ben Stiller (or wasn’t), but the development of Walter’s being – the singular walk we all must endure is so palpable in the scene where he is abandoned by his Sherpas (which would never really happen) to navigate the precipice of a Himalayan summit alone. My girlfriend Jennifer’s favorite line from the movie comes from this scene, “I’m going to keep this short, I need to make oxygen choices.”  Isn’t all of life about discerning what we need, want, value and aspire to make our reality? It’s so fitting that (although filmed in Iceland) that the home to Shangri-La, the mythically created place of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon (a 1st edition of which can set you back four figures!), the path to the spiritual awakening as found by Theos Bernard and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet that are all found in the Himalaya’s, where seekers, real and imagined, ‘find’ themselves and where ultimately Stiller’s Walter finally comes across Sean Penn’s photojournalist character Sean O’Connell and the (equally very real and also allegorical) Snow Leopard. The meaning of life found in traditional rites of passage that have guided boys to becoming men and girls to become women for thousands of years always have found in ritual quest for enlightenment and connection to the Source in solitude. The difference in the movie, and in most of our rather common lives, is the stumbling into rather than the purposeful decision to set out.  Walter, like so many of us, fulfills his journey primarily because other people are depending upon him, have entrusted him (or bullied him) into action.  His path is righteous and selfless and heroic just as Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey and like Paulo Coelho’s protagonist in The Alchemist the treasure he traveled so far to find was with him all along – in the end it is his personal victory in the discovery of himself that we celebrate (in our case with applause in the theatre at the end).

Understanding the challenges facing ordinary men and women as they become heroes is to be courageous and go into the unknown and become the greatest version of ourselves.

If you enjoy my blog please consider sending me the price of a cup of tea in your currency via PayPal to livelikeadog@gmail.com and do share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my print or ebook from Amazon, please click on the cover art of my book, ebook also available through Barnes & Noble and Lulu, thank you!