Dominate Fear. Surrender to Love. — the short film made from this essay (1:44). Watch on YouTube →
Take anything a person does—an argument, a purchase, a text sent at two in the morning, the decision to stay or the decision to leave—and keep asking why. Keep boiling it down. When everything has been analyzed, there are only two things left at the bottom of the pot.
Fear. Or love.
Anger is fear with its teeth showing. Greed is the fear of not having enough. Jealousy is the fear of losing what you have. Control is fear wearing a suit. And on the other side, patience, generosity, forgiveness and the courage you find for someone else’s sake are all love in its working clothes.
Every state you will ever be in comes back to one of those two.
Two ways to move
Underneath our actions sits a second pair of opposites. We can act with dominance or with submission. We take the lead or we yield. We push, or we let go.
Most of us learned to pair them the wrong way round.
When we are afraid, we submit. We shrink. We go quiet, put off the phone call, stay out of the room and let the fear make the decision for us. And when we are in love, we try to dominate it. We grip. We manage the other person, try to control how things turn out and build walls so that we can’t be hurt.
We hand the wheel to fear, and then we fight love for it.
In fear, take command.
In love, surrender.
This is my lesson to you
If you are in a state of fear, act with a sense of dominance. I don’t mean dominance over people. I mean dominance over the fear. Stand up inside it. Name it out loud, then make the call, walk into the room and say the thing you were afraid to say. Fear makes a terrible master and a useful servant. It is there to tell you where to look, and it shouldn’t be the one deciding where you go.
If you are in a state of love, act with a sense of submission, or, as I prefer to call it, surrender. Stop managing it and let it be bigger than you. Love doesn’t need you to grip it. It needs you to say yes. You can’t hold water in a fist, and the tighter you squeeze love, the less of it you keep.
How to tell which one you’re in
Your body usually knows before your mind does. Fear contracts, so your jaw tightens, your chest closes and your world narrows to a point. Love opens, and you can breathe, see further and hear the other person.
When you aren’t sure, ask yourself one question: what am I protecting right now? If the honest answer is me, it is probably fear. So stand up, take the wheel and act.
If the answer is us, them or something bigger than me, it is probably love. So let go of the wheel.
Every day
This isn’t a one-time conversion. You wake up every morning in one state or the other, and most days you move between them before lunch. That makes it a practice, like prayer or training, where the reps are the point.
When fear shows up, stand. When love shows up, kneel.
There is an old line that says perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). I don’t read that as a promise that fear stops coming. I read it as the order of operations: face the fear down on your feet, then give yourself over to the love on your knees, and as you keep doing it, love gets more of the room.
Dominate fear.
Surrender to love, every day.
AI-assisted: the imagery was generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the film’s narration is a synthetic voice (Piper). The words, direction and edit are ours.