Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

by Thich Nhat Hanh

When we suppress our fearful thoughts, they continue to fester there in the dark. We are driven to consume (food, alcohol, movies, etc.) in an attempt to forget and keep those thoughts from surfacing in our conscious mind. Running away from our fear ultimately makes us suffer and makes others suffer, and our fear only grows stronger.

We do not want our fear, our anger, our pain, so we suppress it by filling up our lives with the things provided us by modern civilization: websites, games, films, music.

When we look deeply into a sheet of paper, we see that it’s full of everything in the cosmos: the sunshine, the trees, the clouds, the earth, the minerals, everything—except for one thing. It’s empty of one thing only: a separate self. The sheet of paper cannot be by itself alone. It has to inter-be with everything else in the cosmos.

You cannot be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with everything else in the cosmos. That is the nature of interbeing. I don’t think that the word inter-be is in the dictionary, but I believe that it will be there soon, because it helps us to see the real nature of things, the nature of interbeing.