FEAR and HOPE

By having any small, medium or big size of the dictionary, you are usually finding the meaning of the word “fear.” You can use it in both noun and verb to express your feeling of anxiety, being afraid or scare of somebody or something. This is the most simple word that we use in our daily life when meet any kind of situation that we cannot do it. Remember! “When we meet any kind of situation that we CANNOT do it,” I just want to emphasize this phrase because I want people to realize something about it when they start having FEAR inside their feeling.

The fluctuation of life is infinite. Again, life here, I refer to the three (3) different kinds of life: personal, academic, and professional life. Of course, this variation is too numerous to be counted. However, every single of us is trying to find the stability of our life by trying to eliminate the downtrend of this fluctuation as much as we can. And we need to ask ourselves, what are we going to do for eliminating these distracted factors? And how are we going to take as our first step to achieve that?

FEAR is the thing that you need to look into as your first starting point. In the simple meaning, “fear” is an anxious feeling, but on the other hand, FEAR stands for “Fail, Evidence, Appearance, and Real.” Of course, there may be a lot of people know about it already and I may be reinvent the wheel here, but I am quite sure that my emphasis would be a little more helpful in order to make all of you to be understandable about the real concept of this FEAR and the reasons why it is very useful for all of us to know and apply it in the correct and positive ways.

In order to let you know more about the 4 words that we are talking here, I would like to give you one example. OK, let’s say if you some kids or even some adults, you can ask them if they want to spend their one whole night alone inside or staying behind Angkor Wat Temple or not. Of course, if they do, then we will give them the biggest rewards for that. This is what my sister always asked me when we were travelling across Angkor Wat Temple in Siem Reap. I am frightened and always answer “No” to her even though she gave me anything I want. Of course, in my mind, there is only one phrase “I will never ever do that in my whole life.”

If you looked at me at that moment, you can ask 4 questions: 1. Am I failed to do it? 2. Do I have any evidence to be scared of doing it? 3. Do I know what is going to happen to me if I did that? 4. What are the real harmful things that could happen to me if I decided to do that? To answer the first question, I would say “Yes, I failed to do it. And for the second question, I will say “Of course, I have no evidence of what is going to happen.” For the third one, I will say “Yeah… Nothing happens yet, so how I can know what will appear.” And to answer the final question, I will say “There is nothing real happens to me yet because I never tried it at all.” If you quickly look at my answers (it may probably be your answers as well), you will notice that there is nothing real here. I never did anything before, but I am very afraid. Why? Because of the fearfulness.

In reality, it can apply into many situations such as fear to telling the truth to teacher about being late in class, fear to approach a beautiful girl and tell her that you love her, fear to face the truth of our mistakes or fear that other people will never forgive you, fear of being complaint by the customers, and so, so on. It meant this FEAR can cost us a lot in our lives. Some people are trying to read other people’s minds. They felt that if they tell these people the truth, these people will punish or put them in jail and blame them a lot. But in reality, do the fearful people, themselves can read these other people’s minds or not? Ok, think about it and tell me back… I think we will have the same answer here.

Therefore, in order to correct our fearfulness or stop being “Fail, Evidence, Appearance, Real,” we need to do something call “HOPE.” Let us try to change my several negative phrases above from FEAR to HOPE.

“I do hope that my teacher will accept my lateness because this is just only one time that I am for his class. Ok, I need to approach this girl because I hope that she will say something good to me even though she does not love me now. I did make mistake, but I know and accept my mistake, so I do hope that s/he will give me the second chance to correct my mistake and being a good person again. The customer is the only hope that I have for my business movement, so without customers my business is not going to grow faster, so everything that I need to do now is to face that reality of the problems with my customers and I hope they will understand it after my explanation.”

After the correction from using the word FEAR to HOPE, you will be very optimist and positive to be living in this world. You will see a lot of bright sky with the beautiful sun, moon, and stars running over your head. And you will happily with what you have and being very motivated and energized to move forwards and keep growing and growing very day.

Again, I always remember this phrase from my manager “If someone called you a “fool,” please do not be angry with him. Tomorrow, after releasing your anger, go back to meet that man and ask him why he called you like that yesterday, you will learn something new from him.” :)

Sochheka Ong

Tuesday 12th January, 2010

Big thanks to my manager – Mr. Michael Kwatia