A Weekly Pause to Move You Forward
”Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.”
- Winston Churchill
In Joshua Tree, I walked a labyrinth at sunrise. The desert was still, the rocks glowing with first light.
A labyrinth is not a maze. There are no dead ends. You enter with a simple intention, follow one winding path to the center, pause, then retrace the same path back out. It is a walking meditation: step by step in, step by step out, carrying a mantra with you.
The labyrinth I walked at sunrise in Joshua Tree.
As I walked, old fears surfaced. Not new ones, the same familiar scripts:
Fear of failing.
Fear of disappointing.
Fear of falling behind.
For years, those fears carried me. They pushed me to prepare harder, to work later, to keep pressing when others stopped. In their way, they worked.
But near the center, a sharper realization came:
What if fear was never required? What if it was only the story I told myself?
And deeper still: I can no longer accept fear as my fuel.
Not in small doses. Not as background noise when life speeds up. Fear may have pushed me through the past, but I refuse to live my life in fear.
I want to drop it.
And yet, we often treat fear like tuition. Pay it, and you earn success. But science and experience say otherwise.