Fear is the mind-killer

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

My own fears at the moment (in an effort to pass them over and through me, because we cannot survive without fear, but we should always strive to not let our fears rule us):

• Loneliness: I fear I will not ever find my soul-mate, either through some cruelty of the universe or through some fault of my own. Perhaps I must find and come to peace with my own soul (and by this I def. do not mean in the organized religious sense) before I can find a kindred soul.
• Money, money, money: we are taught from birth to live and breath and worship this all encompassing source of social fabrication and, to my mind, false value. There is no escaping it's tight grasp, so I try to put it in its place: as a minor occasional, socially-necessary annoyance; on a par with jury duty or taxes. I will never be rich and to me that is a proper thing (for me) - I have seen precious little of true value (and invariably, almost zero truth), in fact, come from money or the things it can get you. But still, I need "things"; I want other things. And to get them I must undertake actions that from my perspective jeopardize my happiness. So I sometimes feel stuck in a limbo between the mostly false happiness of physical possessions and the lack of true wholeness that I suspect comes from living a life free of money or possessions. And no, I do not want to become an aesthetic monk or something - you need to believe in a god for that to work...I only believe in myself and truth (and subsequently, hopefully, love) when it comes down to it.
• Rejection: suppose I find my soul-mate someday - what if she rejects me? What if that person is already in my life and I just don't see it? What then?!!! However, I do believe we make our own destiny and that what we put out to the universe will be echoed back to us in the same tone. So I continue to hold on tightly to hope and truth and try hard to maintain my self-confidence in the face of the continuing failures of my love life.

So in the end, at the bottom of us all, perhaps all there is is a choice: hope or fear. I will always choose hope - of that I am sure! Whether I can carry that choice successfully into my actions on a regular basis, however, remains to be seen - and hence the eternal, internal struggle and balance between hope and fear...