When someone else's fear looks exactly like yours

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

After the last post went out — the one about the open ocean, about being the last one to jump — something happened that I didn't expect.

A member of our community wrote to me. He is a former United States Marine. And he said: I know exactly what you are talking about.

He told me about being 18 years old, standing in full gear — backpack, helmet, rifle — and being told to jump into deep water and tread until the drill instructor said to come out. He had not expected that. And then, before he had time to recover, his platoon of thirty men was put into a gas chamber. Exposed to tear gas. No preparation. No way out until it was over.

He said: I am very familiar with that fear.

I sat with his words for a while.

Because what struck me was not that he had been afraid. It was that he had gone through anyway. Not because the fear disappeared. Because there was simply no gap for it to take hold.

There is something I have noticed — in my own life, and now in watching others — about what happens in the moment just before we let go completely.

There is a difference between two kinds of surrender.

The first kind has no gap. Something happens so fast, so completely, that the thinking mind doesn't get a turn. I remember a challenging situation in my life where my last clear thought was — I die. Nothing followed that thought. No interpretation. No fear of what it meant. Just stillness. And then something rose up through my feet, stood me up, and words came that I had never planned to say.

The second kind has a gap. Even a small one. A half-second where another thought can enter. And in that gap, the mind rushes in with meaning. What does this mean? What will happen? What am I losing? That is where fear lives. Not in the water. Not in the gas. In the gap between surrender and the next thought.

His deep water had no gap. My moment had no gap. The open ocean in Hawaii — for me — had a gap. And I felt every second of it.

There is a third thing I want to tell you, because it belongs here.

I was in third grade. We had a bicycle race — nothing serious, just children on a street. My bicycle was the worst one there. Anyone looking at the lineup would not have chosen me to win.

But something happened just before the race started. A knowing arrived. Not a hope. Not a wish. A clear, quiet certainty: I will win this. There was no room in me for any other possibility. Not because I forced doubt out. Because the knowing was so complete that doubt simply had no place to stand.

I won.

That state — that absolute clarity of being fully yourself, with no gap for uncertainty — is not the same as the surrender of my most challenging moment. But it arrives at the same place. The ordinary thinking mind steps aside. Something else operates.

The Tao Te Ching says, in Chapter 16:

Return to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one's destiny.

Not returning to a plan. Not returning to an idea of who you should be. Returning to the root. To what was there before the gap opened.

Every tradition has pointed at this in its own way. The Psalms say: Be still. A gas chamber full of young Marines, without meaning to, taught thirty men something about what becomes possible when the thinking mind has no choice but to get out of the way.

Neuroscience calls it the prefrontal cortex stepping back. The deeper systems taking over — the ones that don't need language to function.

Different maps. The same territory.

As a member of our community wrote to me after the last post; recognizing something in his own life…

Has something like this happened to you — a moment where the thinking mind simply had no room, and something else moved instead?

I would love to hear it.

Enjoy the song from this teaching. Let it carry you there.
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With love,
Simone