Fear and Anxiety III

“Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.”

Another little problem I have with the classical definition of anxiety is that I believe in the law of cause and effect and it is impossible for me to accept anything that is defined as “accidental” or “without reason.”
To find out what anxiety is – beyond that “a fear without reason” definition – let’s take another example.

By the end of George W Bush’s second term the country was in pretty bad spiritual shape.
Most people feared the worse and braced for an economical crush.
I would qualify that state of mind as an anxiety-fear for the following reasons.
The danger although present can’t be clearly defined. The economy is a pretty large and vague thing. It is also very unpredictable and certainly very uncontrollable.

So what we can do in a situation like that is to apply the “proactive” approach.
You pay off as much of your debt as possible.
You reduce your monthly bills, by reorganizing your priorities or like in my case by refinancing my mortgage.
You build up some financial reserve to build up your financial stability and confidence.
But after all that is done you will still have the “anxiety” part of your fear present.

“Faith makes all things possible.... love makes all things easy.”

What you really need to stop that anxiety is “faith”
Hope is the reverse of “anxiety” and it came to us in the form of the great, black hope “Obama”
Once we accepted him – based on total faith – as the savior of the nation, things did not seem as bad anymore. Although in truth not much has changed in real life.
Faith makes anxiety disappear.

But what is faith and how do we get it?
Faith is a measure and the result of trust.
We have faith in somebody or something based on the trust we have in them.
Then of course the next question is what is trust and how we get that?
Trust is a measure of our experience.
We trust people or things based on the experience – or lack of experience – we have with them.

“Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.”

We might initially give someone the benefit of the doubt and give them our trust but it is very hard to have faith in somebody that has lied or disappointed us in the past.
The anxiety we are having today about the future of our economy is caused by these bad experiences we had have in the past.
We’ve been lied to and disappointed so many times by our leaders that is very difficult to have any hope.
We try very hard to prop up the hope and give them every chance to prove us wrong again and again.
But we are running out of faith.

“Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.”

(to be continued…)