I often use a mirror as an image in my rooms.
A mirror reflects whatever is placed in front of it. Your face in the morning, the light from the window, the room behind you. And the moment you step away, the reflection is gone. The mirror doesn't hold on to it. It doesn't keep yesterday's image and lay it over today's. Each moment, it starts completely fresh.
Now think about how most of us live. We wake up and, before we've done anything, yesterday's worries are already there. Last year's disappointments. A fear that was set down decades ago. We don't meet the new day. We meet it through everything that came before, and very often, what came before is frightening. By the time we've had breakfast, we've already lived through several imagined disasters, none of which have happened.
How do I stop living in fear?
Stop waiting to be fearless before you live. The aim isn't to never feel afraid. It's to become more curious than afraid, so fear can be present without deciding everything for you. And over time, as the old charge behind the fear is removed, much of it simply stops arriving at all.
It's a phrase I didn't coin, and I've heard it attributed to others. But more curious than afraid has been one of the most useful ideas in my life.
Why does fear run so many lives?
Because it's old, and it's convincing.
Most of the fear that runs an adult life wasn't created by the adult. It was set down early, in a moment when a child concluded something about the world. I'm not safe. People leave. If I get it wrong, something terrible happens. That conclusion came with a charge, a feeling fused to it, and the charge has been firing ever since, whenever anything looks even slightly like the original danger.
So the fear feels like it's about today. The meeting, the conversation, the risk, the unknown. But very often it's about something much older, borrowed from a time when you had far less power to protect yourself than you do now. It's closely linked to why anxiety is always about the future, and why the mind so often expects the worst.
Why is "not being afraid" the wrong goal?
Because it keeps fear in charge.
If you believe you have to stop feeling afraid before you can act, then every time fear shows up, you stop. You wait. You try to calm it down, argue with it, make it go away. And fear, which is very good at its job, rarely goes away because you asked it to. So you wait some more. Years can pass this way.
For me, it's never been about not being afraid. It's about being more curious than afraid. When curiosity is larger than the fear, the fear can still be there, and you keep moving anyway. You pull through, not because you've defeated the fear, but because something else in you has become more interesting than it.
That's a very different relationship with fear. It doesn't require you to win a battle first. It only requires you to let something else, something more alive, take a little more of your attention than the fear does.
Where does the courage to begin again come from?
From something you were born with.
We have many abilities as human beings, and one of the most underrated is the ability to start over. Not in the battered-but-wiser sense, carrying every past failure forward as evidence. I mean something closer to the mirror: the capacity to meet a new day as a new day.
Our memories are real, and some of them are heavy. But alongside them, we have something that isn't learned: a natural joy, resourcefulness and creativity that were there before any of the fear. That capacity doesn't get used up. It gets buried.
I know this from my own life. There was a time when fear ran almost everything. I'd lost my job, then my car, then my house. I was bankrupt, and I was sad and alone more often than I like to remember. The fear of what came next was constant. What changed wasn't that the fear disappeared overnight. It was that, bit by bit, something in me became more curious about what else might be possible than afraid of what might go wrong. And my life changed, not because I became someone new, but because I came home to who I was before the fear told me who to be.
Is saying "more curious than afraid" enough?
No, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended it was.
Wanting to be more curious than afraid, and saying so, is a start. It's not the same as becoming it. When the fear is old and deeply charged, affirmations bounce off it. You can repeat the phrase every morning and still freeze at the same moments you always have.
The deeper shift comes when the old charge behind the fear is removed. When that happens, the fear doesn't have to be overpowered by curiosity, because much of it simply isn't there anymore. The situations that used to set it off become ordinary. People describe it with surprise: I realised I wasn't scared, and I couldn't remember when that changed.
How can I start the day more like a mirror?
This practice is for the first few minutes of your morning, at the bathroom mirror.
When you first look into the mirror, pause for a moment before you start your routine. Look at your reflection and notice something simple: this is a new moment. The mirror isn't holding yesterday. For these few seconds, neither do you have to.
Then ask yourself one question, quietly: what am I curious about today?
Not what am I worried about. Not what might go wrong. What am I curious about? A conversation. A problem at work. Something you'll learn. Someone you'll see.
Let one answer come, and hold it for a moment. You might notice the fear is still there in the background. That's fine. You're not trying to remove it in the bathroom. You're simply letting curiosity take the first place in line.
Do it every morning for two weeks. It takes less than a minute, which makes it easy to keep up even on busy days. Most people find that fear starts to lose its automatic position at the front of the day. That's often the first sign that the old story is loosening. It connects to what I wrote in is it too late to start over.
Where can I begin releasing the fear itself?
With the mechanism behind it.
I made a short, deep session called Anxiety Release. It's about twenty minutes. It shows you how fear about the future is stored, and walks you through a process to release it that you can use on your own. If fear has run your life for a long time, and especially if you're working with a doctor or therapist on anxiety, please keep working with your professional. This is a tool alongside that, not a replacement for it.
Every day is a new reflection. You don't have to meet it with yesterday's fear.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.