The lion, hearing an odd kind of voice, and seeing nobody, started up. He listened again; the voice continued, and he shook with fear.
At last, seeing a frog climb out of the lake, and finding that the noise proceeded from that little creature, he spurned it to pieces with his feet.
Hmmm, how will you react when the gas pedal is pushed?
Fear. It is perhaps the most powerful of emotions. Fear triggers what is known as our sympathetic nervous system which has been likened to the gas pedal in a car. It provides us with a burst of energy so we can respond to perceived danger.
This burst of energy fuels the fight or flight response – a deep seated, survival tactic in which we choose how to respond. Stand our ground and fight, or flee the scene. Neither response is by definition right or wrong. The circumstances dictate which we choose to exercise.
But fear can be used as a weapon. It can be misappropriated and turned into a phantom that invades our psyche. Once it finds a home there, we become vulnerable.
Fear when used as a weapon is cumulative. It feeds on itself and spirals. Looking for new parts of us to infect and paralyze. It gets stronger the longer we let it hold court.
Fear turns us into something less than. Less than what we are capable of being. Less than we aspire to be. Less than we were meant to be.
In the fable, the lion, a noble beast, has been infected by fear and becomes less than what creation intended it to be. So much so that the croaking of a creature it would normally not deign to notice strikes terror in its heart.
The lion eventually realizes how foolish it has been and reasserts its rightful place in the pecking order.
It is not hard to see the morale of the fable. But it is one we need to take to heart in the times in which we are living. Fear is not bad in and of itself. But it becomes insidious when it is used against us.
You were meant to live with courage. I was meant to live with courage. It is a choice we both can make.
~ Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .
~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week
Tags: fear · fight or flight · lion and the frog · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · pandemicNo Comments