I want to be feared by no one – not even my worst enemy.  If I am feared then I truly am an enemy.  If I am respected then the enmity disappears and the relationship between constituents is in balance.  Cross the line and welcome in the beginnings of war.

Cross the line from respect into fear and a whole plethora of negatives immediately begin and become immediately ensconced in the relationship.  With children, with students, with lovers and mates, respect enables, perpetuates communication, balances differences and settles souls.

Fear garners immediate mistrust, total stoppage of any chance for communication, unhappiness and ultimately hatred.  There is nothing positive about fear.  It is the road to war.

The two concepts are opposites and yet there is a line of demarcation where we cross over from one to the other.  In that crossing over from respect to fear, we who make the crossing take on and engender immediate hatred, immediate negativity and shut down any chance of healing until the line is re-crossed.  Until then, hatred governs existence.

In order to re-cross back from fear to respect only one additive is needed: Love.  Love is the spoiler of fear.  The little game taught at the feet of Mom was always…

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

Fear is always a minus, a negative, a failure, less than zero.  It has no positive value.  If you are feared, you are evil.  You are expressing evil in some measure and that evil is instantly recognized by people who are centered in goodness.  It cannot be hidden.

Engendering fear gets one nowhere.  It is one of the world’s great misconceptions that to be feared makes one mighty.

The real truth is that to be respected makes one mighty.  To be feared makes one weak and destroys the basis of relationship.

If I am feared, I am a failure as a parent, as a teacher, as a friend, as a mate.  If the United States is feared by anyone around the world, it makes us no better than Hitler’s Germany.

Fear is just that clear cut.

If we are respected, we are loved.

For each of us, it’s a choice we get to make nearly every day.  Which do we choose?  Seems like no choice at all, but it can get a little tricky when it gets down to that thin line.

We must all stay alert to the crossing over of that line.

Let love govern.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.

Even More Inspiration

• Fear Of The Blank Page
• Top 10 Things We Take For Granted

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

4.    Water – This one’s unfortunately soon to slip out of the top 10.  But most of us who read this blog are still pretty blasé about it.  We turn the tap and the water comes out.  When it doesn’t, we groan. “Oh no” knowing what inconveniences that means for our day.  It’s still free – well in restaurants anyway.  We stand under it in the shower and it wakes us, cleans us, feeds us, grows our plants, keeps us alive.  It’s good stuff.
5.    The People Who Shell The Sunflower Seeds – When I was in grade school I used to love to buy those little packs of sunflower seeds in the shell, put a few in my mouth and separate the seeds from the shell with my teeth and tongue, store the seeds over on the right in one gum and then when I had 10 – 15 shelled, spit the shells out and eat the seeds.  Chomping down on those shelled seeds was always a pleasure.  A lotta work for that simple pleasure.  Then one day I walked into the store and they were selling bags of salted sunflower seeds already shelled!  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I’ve been eating handfuls every day since then, never thinking about the work it took by somebody to shell those little guys.
6.    Waking Up – What a concept!  Sleep.  We get tired.  We shut down.  We close our eyes to the world around us and enter into another world, another dimension that we really know very little about where we, for all purposes, cease to be, wallowing in deep sleep, sailing off on the wings of strange, often nonsensical dreams, for about a third of our earthly lives.  And we always expect to wake up!  It goes without saying.  It’s a lot to assume if you think about it.
7.    Elimination – We take it in; we put it out.  In between our pipes strip from the matter what we need and send the rest on to hopeful oblivion.  Both inner and outer plumbing processes are totally taken for granted by most of us more fortunate ones.  With the push of a handle, all is well.
8.    Driving Between The Lines – I just got back from LA.  I’m constantly amazed by the swarms of cars on the freeways.  Basically, they all make it home in one piece.  They all do it right.  All those human beings staying in their lanes, thinking their thoughts, listening to their music, hating their bosses, dreaming their dreams, weeping and laughing, yakking and sitting alone spaced out –  driving between the lines.  Essentially we all want to live.  This is the basic principle behind this miraculous action.
9.    The Internet – This is a new one for the top 10.  The information highway, this wondrous cyber space library of fact and figure, google and twitter, instant satisfaction, endless knowledge is fast becoming our new way of life.  Are we amazed by it? Absolutely!  Are we already beginning to take it for granted?  You bet!
10.    Life

Even More Inspiration

• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• The Ira Awards Part 1
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 2 – Dreams
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 1 – Sleep
• Grieving In Silence
• A Walk In The Woods