Fear that’s shunned metastasizes into feelings that are deeply damaging.

By contrast, fear that’s examined yields powerful discoveries about you at your best. When you get curious and let fear in, what you realize is that your fears are yet one more sign of what you love. I am afraid to write this piece on fear precisely because I love writing things that can help you, and I so desperately want to be helpful. I am fearful of my mom being able to take care of my brother because I love them both so bloody much. My fears pinpoint my loves.

Fear is pain for the psyche. Feel fear and follow it, and it will lead you straight to something or someone you love, to what you are passionate about, to who you care for so very deeply. In this sense, your fear is your wisest and most loving companion. It knows who and what you love—knows it without judgment, without conscious curation, yet so precisely and so urgently that your loves are revealed before you’re aware of them, or even before you’re prepared to admit them.

Try to change your relationship to your fears. Don’t banish them. Don’t fight them. Don’t turn and face them down. Instead, see whether you can learn to honor your fears—which means listening to them, being curious about them, and admiring them as part of the real you. Do this—gently, generously, kindly—and they will show you what you truly love.

On your journey, you’re told to dismiss your fears, to confront your fears, to step outside of your comfort zone. Yet this is all so misleading. Your big choice in life is not “comfort or no comfort.” It is “love or no love.” When you step into things you love, you will feel fear. That’s not just OK, it’s fundamental. So fundamental, in fact, that if you’re doing something and you feel no fear, then you’ve lost your love.

So, take the path of fear, because the path of fear is the path of love.

It’s best to avoid this temptation. As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I

missing here?” Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances. Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. The really good confidants— the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface

problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they

help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process

of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. They prod and lure you along until your own obvious solution emerges into view.” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.248-249)

“Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships, the in- between spaces that are so easy to overlook. How can this friendship or this marriage be nourished and improved? The wise person sees your gifts and potential, even the ones you do not see. Being seen in this way has a tendency to turn down the pressure, offering you some distance from your immediate situation, offering hope.