"Like a patient etherized upon a table." T.S. Eliot

My son Beau sent me a quotation from Jack Handy that cracks me up every time I read it--maybe because it strikes close to home:
"It makes me mad when I hear people say that I turned and ran like a scared rabbit. Maybe it was like an angry rabbit that was running to fight in another fight, away from the first fight."
Some days I don't think there's much left that I'm afraid of: earthquakes, famine, volcano's--pashaaw, what could they do but bring adrenaline? But, other times I worry that I'm frozen in fear, frozen stiff like a statue of marble or lead. Thoreau's words beat through my head like a trapped bird: "I don't want to reach the end of my life and realize I've never lived." Fear is crippling. It's dark and lonely. It's my war.
Mostly, I'm afraid of going numb—like one of Pavlov’s rats that gets shocked so many times she stops moving out of the way? The behaviorist trains her to just sit there because she thinks that no matter what she does the electric shock will come again and again. And thus was born the term "Learned Helplessness".
Numb, "Like a patient etherized upon a table." What is that? What is going numb? It’s not letting any little feeling surface because if one tiny feeling gets though the concrete, others may come until there’s a whole wash of them, a flood that may drown us because the painful ones may be more agonizing than any we’ve yet known, and the sorrow we’ve already known was almost unbearable. I’m afraid of fear and how it can turn us inward to live in such a small suffocating world.
So, sometimes, to choose faith instead of fear means re-framing my day from the very beginning—not just once a week or yearly, but every single day, sometimes every hour. And the fight is endless.
Without the Atonement to oil this process, to soothe this rocky struggle, I wouldn’t last 30 seconds. I would turn my back on the future and stop moving. Like the Wife of Lot, I’d turn into salt because I looked backward instead of having faith in the Lord to shape a good future. He does have that kind of power. He does want our happiness. He does have a stake in our lives turning out well. And He IS very powerful and kind.
To keep my eyes focused takes much strength. This is the single eye in the head of the Buddha. But, there is no other way and definitely no short cuts.