BRITEAST MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 – OCTOBER 2009
Greatest Fears: Things that make or break us
Fear. All of creation has it whether inbuilt or picked up along the way. No-one is ever immune to fear: some fear growing old (be it for aesthetic reasons or for those of dependency); some fear loneliness; some, love itself; some, the exams and their future; some fear the supernatural and many fear spiders & other creepy crawlies. The poor may fear poverty; the rich may fear losing their wealth or indeed that they will never have enough and the lover may fear a broken heart… The list is endless because human beings are fascinating creatures.
Of course fear does not discriminate and confine itself to just the human race. The antelope fears the lion as the fly does the spider’s web as the plant does cabbage does the snail as the snail does the salt (… as the salt does the water?).
Fear can be a great thing for it can be the catalyst to achieving much success – talk to the financially stable and they will tell you how in business you have to take risks – or if you let it, it can come to destroy and paralyze you – after all who ever achieved anything if they were too afraid to try?
Perhaps mankind is guilty of not fearing enough though. P.B.Shelley’s most famous short poem Oxymandias, comes to mind.
‘I am Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!’ says the once powerful Ozymandias to the Creator; the true King of Kings. (Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt.) Where once a vast empire thrived, lie the ruins as described by the traveler telling the tale of the inevitable decline of all men however indestructible they may have been in their time.
But mankind, despite the signs, refuses to heed and chooses to ignore. Do we fear that this earth, this life, time, our wealth, our children, everything we have is but a mere loan to us? Do we fear enough to give our time to the homeless on the street, or smile at a stranger, or utter a kind word, or help someone who is not going to give anything back to us in return?
My greatest fear? That when I stand in front of the One who created me, on that Mighty Day, when I am held accountable for my life, that amidst the shame of my mountainous sins, that I will forget to say ‘thank you’. Thank you for the honour of being created. ■
Asalamualikum Sister!
“Your blog is just amazing”
I guess we can inherit fear, create fear and share fear. What I find most amazing about Allah’s creations is the fact, humans by nature are so similar: we create our own problems and blame others, when we should acknowledge our innate faults – I read somewhere if we are insecure we fear more and thus we react to others in aggressive manner – fright or flight; we think we are in control of our destiny, but in reality we are not in control of destiny – the fear of the unknown is frightening – however we can shape our destiny; we put our nose into other peoples business – the fear of not knowing what the neighbors are doing, only to be reassured that neighbors have a worse condition then us – when we should really try and understand our own business in life and to help others; and we are not perfect but some of us think we are, we as humans should acknowledge that no-one or any creation is perfect because like it or not, we all have a trigger to make us fear.
This life is short and we should make the most of it. Life is complicated and people around us are complicated, some we understand, some we don’t. We should try and shake our fears and open our minds to what is happening around us, we are not all the same but in nature we have fear and that I suppose gives us something to share and talk about only to alleviate our fears.
So thank you for easing some of my fears Sister Nasreen
Masalama
(wa-alaikum as-Salaam)
Fab stuff. Profoundly expressed, thank you.