Faster, Faster

 There is very little difference between fear and excitement in the body. The limbic system is the part of your brain that deals with emotions, stimulation, and memories. The amygdala is a processing center in the brain that is connected to receive messages from our senses and internal organs and the hypothalamus controls your stress levels among other things. But hypothalamus can't gauge your real level of stress. Since everything is so intricately connected in our minds and bodies, when we feel fear the hypothalamus is triggered in the same physiological way as it is when we feel excitement.

So is this feeling that's taken over my entire being excitement or fear? Happiness or dread?

 Do I fight with it or fly with it? Do I swallow it down and ignore it or do I tell it to hold on tight? Do I try and capture this feeling and carry it with me always? Because this feeling, whatever it is, it seems to keep me going. It tells me to get up and try again. It tells me to go one more time because surely this time I'll figure it out. It says face it head on and when things get a little rough, instead of fighting it, lean into it and see where it's trying to take you. 

I feel it from my toes to my fingertips and beyond as if I'm soaring into the heavens with my feet planted firmly on the ground.

 Almost like when you dive head first into the water for the first time after the winter has gone and spring is trying to catch up. You jump, knowing the water will be cold and take the breath from your lungs but in the second after the shock of it all your whole body becomes alive with this feeling... Is it pleasure or pain? Do you get to decide?

I like to think that I could coexist with this feeling forever. The go, go, go, stop. The swift changes between fear and excitement forever switching places and never stopping to stay in the same place for too long and becoming stuck. 

In this feeling I could swim forever. I could carry this my whole life and never tire. 

The body doesn't know the difference between fear and excitement, among all the emotions these two are unclear. But I've always thought that everything sprung from those two places anyways. Love and Hate. Excitement and fear. 

I know that fear is a liar but I have also known excitement to give me false hope. Like when you think you've caught a lightning bug in your hands but when you open your palms to look you find only emptiness, darkness. But the drive for catching that happiness makes you go out in search again and the fear of not finding it is left behind.

 Fear registers about 2 - 5 inches lower in your gut than excitement does and we can consciously use our intentions to shift fear into excitement in our bodies and trick ourselves into thinking we were excited all along. A mere 2 inch difference. Just a little upward shift and you're there. One could say you've been there all along. 

If we think about it that way couldn't we be invincible? ...If we think about it that way, aren't we invincible already? 

The fear keeps me alert, the excitement keeps me alive and the combination of the blurred line between the two keeps me wanting more.

"Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death." -Hunter S. Thompson