It's time to stop living in fear

This means either stop living, or stop the fear. I have been living too long like this. I have acquired fears I never had before. I am afraid of things I cannot name, cannot identify, and cannot fight. I have vague, easily expandable, paralysing, comfortable fears I do not understand. This is new for me, compared to my past life taken as a whole, but it has also been going on for some time. Years possibly. I have been taken over by nameless fears, of what I cannot say, impossible to pin down, impossible to assuage or attack, just there, an amorphous beige sac of dimly felt dread. This is no way to live. Part of this realisation stems from a week or less ago, when I realized, in a new way, that 2001 was 6 years ago. That may seem obvious, as it's 2007 now, but suddenly i realized that i'd been looking on the 'new world order' that various powers used the events of 9/11 to usher in, as something that had only recently started, and would shortly be rescinded, something anomalous, uncomfortable, terrifying in some respects, but not long-lived, and possible to undo. suddenly i realized with a new clarity that this mindset and global situation had been going on, and getting worse, for 5 1/2 years. and that is long. that is a substantial chunk of my life. and more powerfully, i realized that that is a substantial chunk of the naughties. 2000-2010, the first decade of this new century, the one we all looked forward to, the new millennium (before that was the most over-used word on the planet, and later when it became it) that most of this decade has now passed in this terrible situation. and we have let it get worse. and yes, i do think we are all culpable in this, we all being the people of earth. i realized that most of this decade is gone. it has been defined by these ideas of 'terror' and the war on it, by what happened in 2001 and what is was used to excuse and justify since then. and most of all this decade has been defined by fear. and when it's looked back on in history, as i started imagining it being, i realized that it was not a short, burst of anomalous or particular activity, that had just happened, was still finding its feet. this is over five years of this now. this is half a decade and more, and into the late part of the decade, that we have been living like this. this is how this decade has been defined. and most of it is dominated by fear. it is all about fear. we have become paralysed by it, we are afraid to stand up, to say, i believe differently, afraid to say it except perhaps to friends, and often not even to them, afraid to say it publicly, afraid to say it to bosses and police, afraid to really take a stand, that would challenge our comfortableness, that would mean we have to live by it. afraid to take a stance. we're barely even weekend warriors, we just stay, crumpled by fear, thinking this is reality, half-depressed, half-afraid, hardly human, not living. that's how i am, anyway, and i realize i am putting it on everyone else. when of course no-one may feel that way. it may only be me. but i see it all around me. i don't hear a call to arms. i don't see us up in arms, in the streets, in our homes, in our workplaces, saying, this can't go on. this isn't how life is meant to be. this isn't how the world could be. this has to stop. i'm not doing that. i feel it, but i don't live it. i feel that we could, as humans, be so much more, be so much better, live an incredible and amazing life. i believe that. but we don't stand up for it. we do things that are safe. because we are afraid. and i am sick of being afraid. i was afraid of this, of saying who and what i was. of somehow, someone reading it who wasn't 'supposed' to, a boss, a parent, someone vague and ill-defined but none the less powerful for that, in fact more powerful by their very immaterial nature, all-powerful and never named. i am less afraid now. i want to be much less afraid. i want to be brave. it's time to stop living in fear. it's time to start living.