Growing Pains — Fear by Gibran
Essential wisdom about embracing change
Struggling through change is a shared human experience. It is not uncommon to see people become too complacent to pursue their dreams or resign themselves to bad situations, only because change is so deeply uncomfortable for us. Researchers claim that our brain has evolved to keep us in a familiar hell instead of an unfamiliar heaven.
Kahlil Gibran’s poem, Fear, describes this universal experience with unequivocal clarity and exhorts the reader to move forward: take the risks necessary to transform into something much bigger than your current self. The poem describes two separate phases of the journey of change — accepting the loss of everything that you have built and become so far, and then expanding into something new.
Most transformations begin with some kind of grief about what you leave behind. This could be a person, a relationship, a place, an endeavor, or a dream. It is deeply uncomfortable to look at how far you have come and give it all up, only to step into an uncertain future that will subsume everything that exists at present.
Often, change is so scary for us that we wait for life to jolt us into it. We wait to arrive at a juncture from where “it (becomes) impossible to go back”. In this poem, Gibran cautions us to be attentive and recognize these moments of inevitable transformation. And then he encourages us to face our fears and “take the risk of entering the ocean”.
His personification of the river reminds us that fearing change is a uniquely human experience. Nature accepts change as the law. Rivers, after all, do become oceans. Trees shed leaves before flowers bloom. Tectonic plates shift, destroying entire habitats, before birthing mountains.
If you are living through one of these transformative moments right now, I hope this poem gives you the courage to step forward into the expanse. Go forth, ye rivers, become the ocean!
Fear by Kahlil Gibran
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
