There was once a man who had a thousand reasons to pursue his goals, and a thousand not to pursue them—but in the end, he chose not to, and lived with the plague of “what if.”
The melody in his head of “what if” crippled him to do nothing throughout his life, and left him haunted with the question – the question that now could never be answered. His life was a clock that could never be unwound.
What if – the cousin of “should have, could have, and would have”—the terrorist family of doubt, specialising in using fear as a weapon, and causing the Stockholm syndrome in which the act of avoiding is irrationally justified to be better than the act of doing. In reality, the weapon (f.e.a.r) in its true sense is merely “False Evidence Appearing Real.”
The “what if” plague has existed since the days of old and brought destruction to the Israelite grumblers and doubters (Numbers 13 & 14). The Israelites were promised the land flowing with milk and honey, but to get to the land, they had to explore the land and defeat its inhabitants.
Twelve spies were sent to explore the land, and out of the twelve, ten spies, despite knowing that God was on their side, chose to see themselves before the opposition as nothing more than tiny grasshoppers and, irrationally concluded that the opposition were giants. They told themselves that the conquest would be impossible, and gave up. But the two remaining spies, Caleb and Joshua, saw themselves as the giants and the opposition as grasshoppers because they knew that they had the greatest weapon on their side, God (1 John 4: 4 says, “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because greater is He who is in you, than he that is in the world”). Caleb and Joshua would not listen or agree with the negative report, so when the ten spies said it was impossible, Caleb silenced them from delivering the negative report (Numbers 4:30). In their eyes, the report was merely the opinion of the ten spies, and that opinion was not a fact.
The question “what if” will always rear its ugly head – “What if I try and fail?” But the same can also be asked in the positive, “What if I try and succeed? What if the glass is half full and what if the glass is half empty?” Seeing the glass as half full divides the leaders from the followers. To live with the plague of “what if” is like the lion that saw itself as a grasshopper and dared not to explore the jungle for his meal. Like the Israelites, we must overcome before we can achieve. Our adversities may seem like giants from afar, but if we get close enough, we will find that our biggest hurdle was only grasshopper. Silence the negative “what if” and you will silence fear in your life. In the long run, the ones that live “Oh well, I tried” lives, are those who have no regrets. They learn and grow from their experiences to become better people for it. The coward that lives plagued and haunted with memories of “what if” will always be left the same as when they started, or worse.
As William Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once …”
©Katie Mliswa and MomentsbyKatie.M, 2017.
