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Here
I go writing another piece inspired by a television show---a couple of
weeks ago it was Frasier, and
now it’s one of the latest in "reality-based" TV.
This reality show is called Fear
Factor, and I saw it quite by accident at first, but found that it had
some rather redeeming qualities that the network probably didn’t count
on. Six contestants compete
for a $50,000 prize by confronting some commonly held fears like heights,
enclosed spaces, and of course, eating something really gross.
At the beginning of the show, the host encourages the contestants
to play on each other’s fears and try and psych each other out, and some
of the players comply with nasty comments here and there.
But in the few episodes I’ve seen, the process of going through
these physical and psychological challenges actually starts to bring the
competitors together. They hug
each other after they’ve made their "free fall" from a 15
storey building, and they cheer each other on as they each try to down a
cocktail of live worms. Some
players even apologize to the live worms or beetles that are the
unfortunate sacrifices of the game show.
The emotion generated in tackling these fears is really quite
touching. And when someone
eats a pile of insects, dirt and all, or crawls through a tunnel with
rats, we can’t help but realize that we humans are tougher than we
think, and a lot of the stuff we worry about on a daily basis is kind of
unnecessary.
It
seems to me that the players who make it to the final round lose sight of
the $50,000 prize and become much more involved in the process of
completing the challenges. Sure,
they are disappointed if they don’t win in the end, but during the
challenge they are living totally in the moment, and, to me, that’s a
big deal. The process of life
is often very frustrating to me---things take longer than I would like, or
obstacles seem bigger than they need to be.
I’d like to cut to the chase, get to the end result.
Even if the outcome is not as I would like, at least I can deal
with it if I know what it is. But
I am realizing that the process is there for a reason.
In fact, the process is the point of it all, and the outcome is
incidental. Facing a fear, or
a challenge, is what moves us forward to the next round and enables us to
do bigger and better things with our lives.
Having a material reward delivered to us before we are ready to
receive it is a useless gift. What’s
the good of having a nice car if deep down we don’t believe we deserve
it, or if feel that people won’t respect us without it.
But if we can work on gaining an improved self-image, then the
fancy car, or the courage to admit that we’d rather ride a bicycle to
work will come to us as appropriate. Dr.
Thurman Fleet, the founder of Concept-Therapy, wrote that greed is "the
desire to gain more knowledge, greater power, and better security in a
shorter time and an easier way than through the process of natural
growth." I must have read
this phrase a hundred times, but I am just now starting to understand it.
There’s nothing wrong with having what we want in life, but we
must always respect the process of finding it.
Karen
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