How to Choose Love and Stop Playing Small
“There’s faith and there’s fear. Both require you to believe in something that hasn’t happened yet.” — Sam Crowley
Every day, you get the opportunity to make an innumerable number of choices. And, at the risk of sounding pedantic, at the core our choices are motivated by either love or fear. It’s when we begin to examine our motives behind our choices that life starts to get really interesting.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Plato
We often play small and choose fear because we think it will keep up safe. Safe from getting our hearts broken. Safe from failure. Safe from looking foolish. Safe from making “bad” decisions again. But the paradox is this kind of safety is an illusion. Because it keeps us from taking the kind of risks that make life dangerous, yes, but also ultimately rewarding.
You may have heard the expression, “Fortune favors the bold.” Make no mistake, in a culture that encourages us to play small, to be afraid, to play it safe all the time — choosing what we love and what makes our hearts sing is a radical act of rebellion. Loving ourselves unconditionally and extending that love to others is perhaps our greatest work here on Earth.
Easier said than done, though, right? It’s easy to pontificate in a blog post about how to choose love over fear. But HOW do we do that? How do we choose love when someone is screaming in our face? How do we choose love when someone misleads us? How do we choose love when we are betrayed or cheated on? These are the moments that test our resolve to love, to forgive, to have compassion and to release judgment.
I’m not suggesting that we bypass our anger, our resentment or any other challenging feelings. By all means, allow yourself to deeply feel your emotions. But don’t dwell there. Don’t let yourself close off and shut down. Don’t allow the pain to poison you and turn you against your playful heart. On the other side of the pain is relief, perspective and healing.
Let’s get back to fear for a moment, because it’s a juicy topic. There’s so much rhetoric in our culture about being fearless, but I think that’s missing the point. We can’t BE fearless. Fear will always play a role. It will always be a factor. What we CAN do is make something more important than our fear. If we can create a motivation that is anchored in passion, purpose and a clear direction — we can acknowledge the fear while moving forward. It’s like dancing with your fear while saying, “Hey old friend. I see you. I hear you. I know you want to stop me from saying yes to love. But I’m going to do this anyway. Thanks for the input though.”
“It’s not about slaying the dragon. It’s about learning how to dance with the dragon but not letting him lead.” — Jason Wrobel
And, at the core, aren’t all of our deepest fears just permutations of the fear of death? Whether it’s a literal fear of death — or just a death of the ego, the death of our status in society, or the death of our carefully constructed self-image? There’s some fear of the Self ending or ceasing to exist in some form that we are attached to.
The irony is that we are so afraid of something that’s imminent. We will change. Our sense of self and who we are changes over the course of our lives. And, we must accept the ultimate truth of our lives: that our bodies will cease to exist someday. So why are we so afraid of the inevitable?
Want to find some quick motivation? Meditate on your death. Not in a morose or macabre way. Simply remind yourself on a consistent basis that all this is going to end soon. Really. Before we all know it, this life will be over. Where we go from there? Who really knows! But the motivation that this sweet, precious, wild life is ending soon should be ever present in your mind and your heart.
When we realize that we are going to have to let go of everything and everyone that we know someday… we realize we have nothing to lose. We can give ourselves permission to choose love and to play FULL OUT with anything we put our attention on. And really — isn’t that what we all want? To be FULLY ALIVE? To be passionately, madly, acutely engaged with things that light up our very souls? To be fully committed to our passions? To show up for the people we love with open hearts and open minds?
This, my friend, is our work. To remember every day we can choose love, reality, and compassion — or fear, illusion and resentment. The good news? Life loves you so much that you get an infinite number of chances to practice choosing love. Because at the end of this life, it’s the only thing that we take with us. The love that we gave and the love that was given to us.
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” — Leo Tolstoy
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