fears

Not to long ago a friend asked me what was my biggest fear.
Well the answer was and is: my biggest fear already came true.

This got me thinking what does this mean for anything else i might fear? If your biggest fear came true and you lived though it, does any other fear come to take its place or are you left without fear or does it change nothing?

I started thinking about things which I am afraid of. I realized that my new experience (misery) gave me understanding of a few things I could not understand before. And I feared these new things. Some of these things could even be seen as the logical progression of the state I was in. So I suppose in a sense the experince of one fear can lead to many more which could not even be understood before.  But all these new fears were all internal. They were fears of something which might happen to me with no external cause; in fact nothing external could possibly cause them.

These fears bothered me for a while. Until recently(today maybe) I realized I no longer fear them. I am not sure why. I guess i realized that such an internal change could never happen. I know myself well enough to say that.    

now what about other fears... well I have never been afraid of very much but now i suppose I see the few fears i do have as meaningless. If anything i hold onto them out of habit. strange holding onto a fear out of habit. Take for example the one thing I have always been afraid of: singing in public. I can't say that my fear is completely gone but for the most part it is. often times i want to break out singing and the only thing that stops me is that I remember i would never have done so before and out of habit stop myself. But it is now out of habit and not fear. A strange thing indeed.

anyways fear is an interesting thing, and chances are i am completely wrong about my self analysis.

 

I Promise not to snooze.

(This worked at first but ultimately failed)

promises

Promises are an interesting idea. specifically promises to ones self.

I believe if you make a promise you dammed well better do everything in your power to fulfill such a promise. This is just part of the definition of a promise. If not, then the promise is empty words

Now when I make a promise to a friend, i always keep it(unless that is something completely unexpected happens preventing me from taking that action). The one thing that will stop me from doing what I promised would be if the friend told me they did not want me to do it anymore. And this leads me to a crucial part of what a promise is: it is something you decide to do for someone. "I promise" does not exist, only "I promise you" exists (given the you can be implied). With this in mind, once that someone decides they do not want something to be done for them the promise is nullified. 

Now then is it even possible to make a promise to ones self. why not? "I" can exist as the subject and object of the promise. There is however one problem: if i promise myself something, at any moment, I might change my mind, I might decide i do not want that action to be done and as a result nullify the original promise. Add to this the fact that we are constantly changing our minds and a promise to oneself can hardly last longer than a day. Is it then even possible to sustain a promise to ones self? Theoretically yes, if you can continually reaffirm the state you were in when you made the promise you should be able to keep it. This can be done by continual measurement of your state. Practically no, I have tried this and failed time after time. I cannot keep a promise i make toward myself. Eventually a time comes when I decide my former self was a fool.

So whats to be done now that i know i cannot keep a promise to myself. The obvious answer is don't make them. I don't like that answer. Think about the power of being able to promise yourself something. you will gain the ability to rely on yourself. The ability to decide to do something and do it.

Thus far I have failed in all my attempts at a self promise, but with this blog i have a new idea. I can use this blog as a way make promises to myself that are also promises to the world. I know myself well enough to know i can keep promises i make to others, thus by converting a promise to myself to a promise to others I should be able to keep it.

Heres to hope.