What's Holding Me Back?

March 17, 2004

On a warm, still, summer evening last week, I was working happily in my garden, accompanied by laughing kids and singing birds. All seemed well with the world. Had I kept digging - on and on, right through the center of the earth and out the other side - I would have emerged in Spain, not far south of Madrid. And in Madrid, at that very moment, bombs were exploding, murdering two hundred good folk along with their dreams.

Once again, we are reminded of how fragile, fickle, precious, our existence is. A tragedy like this prompts a new resolve in us to stop procrastinating and push ahead with the things that matter most to us.

Yet we don't, do we? Something holds us back. What is it?

Over the course of my life, I've often struggled to understand my lack of progress on things that are important to me. More often than not, the answer I've come up with has been fear of failure: I'm not up to it. I'm not good enough. I couldn't do it.

But is fear of failure really the biggest barrier? Marianne Williamson doesn't think so. She wrote in A Return to Love (these words are often wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inauguration speech):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.