Beginning: Richard Nixon, My Dad, and Making Friends With Fear

We pack up fear; we push it away. We focus our efforts on beating fear, and when we can’t beat it we try our best to ignore it. What if we could embrace it? What if we could make it our mission to do exactly the thing that scares us most?

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear and how to hold it close. Compass Yoga scares me on a daily basis, not because I’m worried that we can’t live up to the mission but because what we’re taking on is such an enormous, gangly, unwieldy mess.

We want to greatly alter the healthcare system. We want yoga and meditation to stop being “alternative therapies” and fully integrate them into traditional treatment plans. As accepting as society may be of yoga and meditation for the well, it’s still quite new to think that yoga teachers could and should be on par with medical doctors and therapists when it comes to assessment and treatment of those who have serious health challenges. And yet, in spite of the fear, I know this is the right direction for our healthcare system from a moral, scientific, and financial perspective. This thinking is new, and scary.  

Fear is not remarkable. Everyone, every day has fears of varying degrees. It always interests me to know what keeps others going, especially when they’re petrified of what they’re doing. I used to think that we could move ahead once we got rid of fear, and so I set about looking for ways to banish it from my system. I have always met a bit of frustration in this area because my fears never seem to fully dissipate. They stick with me – sometimes as just a little nagging voice in the back of my mind and sometimes as the star on center stage with a big ass microphone. Fear and I hang out on a very regular basis.

There are two people who keep me moving forward: my dad and his story and the too-soon ending of his life, and Richard Nixon. When I saw the play Frost/Nixon, I began to understand how disappointment can take someone down, how enough shame and embarrassment about our circumstances and choices can fundamentally warp our view of the world and the people around us. In that moment, I also began to forgive my dad. The play contains a very dark scene where Richard Nixon, played brilliantly by Frank Langella, calls David Frost and explains a part of his back story that helps us to understand how pride, when taken too far, can move us into a dangerous state of unsupported arrogance that consumes us.

I hate to say this, but I actually felt a great deal of sympathy for Richard Nixon as a result of that scene. Me, a liberal through and through, felt badly for Richard Nixon. I understand now that the sympathy I felt for Richard Nixon in that moment is the same sympathy that has allowed me to understand my dad.

Like Richard Nixon, my dad was an incredibly insecure, embarrassed, and disappointed man. He lived most of his life that way and he died that way His fear of never living a worthwhile life eventually consumed him. Beneath that thin veil of arrogance, there was a man who feared his life would never amount to wait he wanted it to be. And he couldn’t take in that fear. Eventually it overwhelmed him.  

The irony in the midst of this sad and unfortunate story is that my dad’s example has saved my life, and continues to save it every day. I keep moving forward with Compass Yoga, my writing, and my teaching because I have seen what becomes of someone who can’t embrace fear, who looks in the mirror and sees too much time gone by without doing what he really wanted to do with his life. When I look in the mirror, I see him in my eyes staring back at me. We are not so different; all that separates us are our choices about fear: to keep moving or become paralyzed.  

We could all be my dad. We could all be Richard Nixon. Every day, we all come to a fork in the road, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood“. And at each junction, there’s one common underlying choice: do we embrace fear or do we vow to wait it out? If we embrace it, live the very thing that frightens us, then we can keep moving. Choose to wait it out and the world will eventually pass us by.

Which way would you rather go?