I had blogged this on Medium, a couple of years back. Thought it would be nice to share it with you here. I am posting the original

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A while ago i had the great opportunity to go on a ride with one of my best friends on his motorbike. The experience was as thrilling and amazing as was expected… and even more! It made me realize how much Life is like a ride on a motorbike, which is very different from that inside of a car.

As my friend was speeding through the streets of the south of Malta, my imaginative mind drifted into images of what would happen, how it would feel, if we were to skid and fall off. The mere thought of it, and the images portrayed in my mind thanks to this, made me feel afraid. Then i told myself to stop imagining the worst, and focus on the beauty of the ride. I shifted my imagination into one in which i believed i was flying; the wind hitting me everywhere, the surge of adrenaline when overtaking cars, the slight tilt to the left or right during a turn.This experience made me realise that all the above can be attributed to any experience in our lives.

Fear in itself is unreal, non-existent. Danger yes is real, and always present, like during a motorbike ride . But fear needs imagination to grow. Same goes to the opposite of Fear; happiness, or call it whatever you want, feeds on imagination. So basically, what you set yourself to imagine and focus upon, feeds and grows either fear or joy. Fear takes away the sense of enjoyment.

All this, however, is based on one important factor; which i thought about during this ride: Trust. All of the above loses context and sense if we first fail to identify whether i trusted my friend, who was actually driving the motorbike, or not. In this case i definitely did. Not a moment did i doubt he knew what he was doing. This of course helped me relax and imagine i am flying, rather than feeling afraid.

I believe that in life, we need to have this kind of Trust. Many times, unfortunately, we have lost this sense of Trust in something bigger than us; something OTHER than ourselves. We trust ourselves, because we feel that we can easily be cheated. Because deep down we are afraid of what might happen — exactly the same concept i was explaining above when i started to imagine what would happen if we fell of the bike. This lack of Trust in something bigger — fate, God, karma, choose whatever you like! — establishes a deep sense of longing in our lives. Even more unfortunate is the fact that we are very much so often not even aware that this sense of unease exists inside us. We constantly believe that we can fight our Fears by ourselves, face problems and come out of them alive, alone. What a pity, because in doing so we’re feeding our fear. And fear grows easily.

Trust — as a concept — is either present or not. Only one of us could drive the motorbike today, not both at the same time. I could either trust my friend during the motorbike ride (and thus allow him to drive) or else i could not trust him (and thus not take the ride). There is no “in between”. You either trust someone, or you don’t. And that if that trust exists, despite all the problems one has to endure, pain, struggles… anything is faced and tackled differently. Because trusting in God, (etc…) deep down gives you the conviction that everything is being taken care of; everything happens for the good, for the better.

Photo by Adel on Unsplash