This is for all the “wait”-ers

(Quick note before you start reading: Feel free to change “plates” to whatever thing you’re saving for a “special occasion”.)

A lot of people have that cabinet – the one with the fancy plates, the ones that only come out on Thanksgiving or for a dinner party, or when relatives who they haven’t seen in years suddenly announce a visit. It’s that cabinet, and those plates, and there they sit, waiting for someone to take them out and use them, show them off, be proud of them.

Now, of course plates don’t have feelings. It’s a metaphor.

For how we sit. And wait. And collect metaphorical dust, waiting for life to just suddenly happen. For things to “get better”, for things to “settle down”, for a moment when we “have more time” or “more money”.

For someone to give us permission to live our lives the way we really want to be living them.

Most people I know do it, or have done it. I have done more than my share of it. We all do at some point.

Some of us do it on a large scale, where we spend years and years of our lives waiting to “use the fancy plates”, and some of us do it on a smaller scale, giving away minutes or hours to waiting for the “right time”. Yet there is a cost to it that, I surmise, were it given a monetary value no one would be willing to pay. Or very, very few of us.

So why do we continue to do it?

It’s the same reason we don’t use the fancy plates: we’re afraid.

Afraid of one of the plates getting cracked, or broken. Afraid of how we seem to other people because we use the fancy plates for our “regular” dinners, and we don’t want to Make Anyone Feel Bad. Maybe we’re even afraid we might actually kind of love using the fancy plates.

The list goes on and on…and on…and on. And the trouble with the list is just that – it goes on and on and on. The longer we spend writing the list, the more things we will have to put on it.

I would guess that there are at least 5,000 books in the world right now on how to conquer fear. They’re out there, and tens of millions of people read them, sometimes more than once, and yet they are still walking around with 10,000 pounds of fear sitting on their shoulders. They continue to write checks to the Fear Fund, hoping one day they will get a return on their investment, when in reality the money is going nowhere and doing a whole lot of nothing.

The truth is that reading a book will not help you conquer fear – if that’s the only action you take around it.

Here’s why: if you are still carrying fear around something, you have not conquered it yet, and so it keeps showing up and up, and you continue feeling it. Because once the fear is truly conquered, it goes away. By itself. No amount of mantras, or meditation, or reading is going to get you there any faster. The thing that will get you there the fastest is conquering it, whatever “it” is, and the only way to do that is to…just do it. Stare it down, punch it out, git ’er done. Whatever your favorite Kick Fear’s Butt phrase is, that’s it. There is no other way.

So go ahead and use the fancy plates! And one of them might get cracked. Or break. And some people might feel bad because you are using fancy plates and they aren’t. That’s OK. Use them anyway.

Please, use them anyway.