THEREFORE I TELL YOU, DO NOT BE ANXIOUS ABOUT YOUR LIFE . . . LOOK AT THE BIRDS OF THE AIR . . . CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD . . . —MATTHEW 6:25ff.
Everyone at some time or the other experiences feelings of what is known as insecurity. You feel insecure with the amount of money you have in the bank, or the amount of love you are getting from your friend or the type of educational background you have had. Or you have insecurity feelings regarding your health or your age or your physical appearance. If you were asked the question, “What is it that makes you feel insecure?” you would almost certainly give the wrong answer. You might say, “I don’t have enough of the love of a friend” or “I don’t have the kind of academic training that I need,” or some such thing. In other words, you would point to some outside condition not realizing that insecurity feelings are not generated by anything outside of you, but only by your emotional programming, by something you are telling yourself in your head. If you change your program, your insecurity feelings would vanish in a second, even though everything in the outside world remained exactly as it was before. One person feels quite secure with practically no money in the bank, another feels insecure even though he has millions. It isn’t the amount of money but their programming that makes the difference. One person has no friends, yet feels perfectly secure in the love of people. Another feels insecure even in the most possessive and exclusive of relationships. Again the difference is in the programming.
If you wish to deal with your feelings of insecurity there are four facts that you must study well and understand. First, it is futile to ease your insecurity feelings by trying to change things outside of you. Your efforts may be successful, though mostly they are not. They may bring some relief, but the relief will be short lived. So it is not worth the energy and time you spend in improving your physical appearance or making more money or getting further reassurances of love from your friends.
Second, this fact will lead you to tackle the problem where it really is, inside your head. Think of the people who in exactly the same condition that you find yourself in now would not feel the slightest insecurity. There are such people. Therefore the problem lies not with reality outside of you but with you, in your programming.
Third, you must understand that this programming of yours was picked up from insecure people who, when you were very young and impressionable, taught you by their behavior and their panic reactions that every time the outside world did not conform to a certain pattern; you must create an emotional turmoil within yourself called insecurity. And you must do everything in your power to rearrange the outside world—make more money, seek more reassurances, placate and please the people you have offended, etc., etc.—in order to make the insecurity feelings go away. The mere realization that you don’t have to do this, that doing this really solves nothing, and that the emotional turmoil is caused solely by you and your culture —this realization alone distances you from the problem and brings considerable relief.
Fourth, whenever you are insecure about what may happen in the future, just remember this: In the past six months or one year you were so insecure about events which when they finally came you were able to handle somehow.
Thanks to the energy and the resources that that particular present moment gave you, and not to all the previous worrying which only made you suffer needlessly and weakened you emotionally. So, say to yourself: “If there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I’m going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment, because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.”
The final disappearance of insecurity feelings will only come when you have attained that blessed ability of the birds of the air and the flowers of the field to live fully in the present, one moment at a time. The present moment, no matter how painful, is never unbearable. What is unbearable is what you think is going to happen in five hours or in five days; and those words you keep saying in your head, words like, “This is terrible, this is unbearable, how long is this going to last,” and so on. Birds and flowers are blessed above humans in that they have no concept of the future, no words in their heads, and no anxiety about what their fellows think of them. That is why they are such perfect images of the kingdom. So do not be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own. Set your mind on God’s kingdom before everything else and all the rest will come to you as well.
~From Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello
