today's blinding revelation

It's very simple. I don't know why it didn't occur to me in such simple terms before.

I was talking with the office paralegal this morning, who, like me, is a book enthusiast and an emotional barometer for the immediate environment. (Most of my life struggles can be summed up in adapting to, and managing, deep and hyper sensitivity.) She said this great thing:

"It all boils down to two things. I know this is simplistic, but here it is: It all boils down to love and fear."

Evidently East of Eden expouds greatly upon this theme, so now I must pull it out of the garage and read it. (And by "now" I mean "sooner than my retirement"; that queue never gets shorter.)

So I've been going through the part of my mind that remains active and busy even when the rest of it is engaged in other tasks, sorting out the goods and evils I know or have read about, and it can all be categorized under love or fear. Because those are truly opposite. Which is why the Bible says, "Perfect love drives out all fear." The two can coexist, but love in its perfection knows no fear. Fear is the opposite of love. Not hate; hate is equal parts love and fear. Even the seemingly neutral concept of indifference relates to fear.

I read once in The Blue Castle (possibly my favorite book of all time, ever, period) that "fear is the original sin." I disagreed for a long time, but, upon reflection, it's not far off. The temptation presented to Eve in the garden was the enticement of knowledge, and she responded in fear of ignorance rather than love of God -- perhaps the suspicion that God was holding out, the nagging feeling that being like God would be better than simply living in the perfection of His love.

(The Shack posits that independence was the original sin, and I concur with that. But fear, in many cases -- and I'm not talking the healthy kind of independence where kids grow up and leave home, or a country refuses to bow to a monarchy; independence is a convoluted concept -- is the root of the desire for independence.)

Today my life philosophy is this:

Everything boils down to love and fear. There is nothing else.

I've been pondering a lot lately on how much I live in fear, mostly the fear of offending others or the fear of driving them away, the fear of doing something wrong in how I relate to others and winding up alone forever. I've been getting tired of it, and realizing that over the past few years my coming-of-age experiences have helped in paring away a lot of my other fears. It's kind of neat to see the progress over time -- usually I'm more adept at focusing on the failures. It heartens me in preparing to lay siege to these particularly stubborn holdouts.

We'll see what love and stubborn choice can do.