Whether you think you can or you think you cannot, you are right.—Henry Ford Do you ever sometimes find yourself daydreaming about yourself? Well, maybe you wouldn’t call it daydreaming as such, but you can see yourself in another reality, a set of circumstances that might seem not only unbelievable but, in your understanding of your limited reach, quite unlikely to occur. Like, for instance, while waiting for your trotro, you envision yourself driving a sleek new car. Or, while working resentfully at the job you so loathe, you envision yourself joyfully engaged in the work you wish you could have—an IT technician, a bank manager, or a singer, standing on a stage entertaining a large, admiring crowd. When this happens, as it does to every single one of us, we more often that not dismiss these visions. We chuckle at the very idea of us doing whatever it was we saw or being with whomever it was we imagined ourselves with. We shake our heads as if physically trying to will the vision out of our mind-space and then, without a second thought, we immediately go back to whatever it was we were actually doing, to the life we know with the places and the people that are all-too-familiar to us. But what if that seemingly unreal vision in your head is your modern day burning bush, a divine invitation to step into your appointed greatness? For over two decades, I lived in Los Angeles. One of the first flats I had there was directly across the street from a bus station. If you were to stand right in the centre of that street and face North, you’d have a clear view of the legendary Hollywood sign. Every Saturday morning, while washing dishes, I used to watch those buses unload fresh crops of young people, many of whom, it was safe to guess, had come to Los Angeles to “make it!” They’d exit the bus and stand still for a few moments and just stare at the Hollywood sign. In their faces, I could always see disbelief, hope, excitement, and joy. The one emotion not visible to the naked eye was fear, but for many of them it would be the emotion they would come to know best. Fear is the emotion that keeps many of us from reaching the highest vision we have of ourselves: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of change, fear of stepping out into the unknown with nothing more than faith. Fear can be a powerful obstacle, so powerful in fact that it usually masks itself as everything but what it truly is. It can mask itself as commitment, as discipline, as comfort, as power, even as love. I’ve heard people use many of those words to justify whatever fear is making them unable to leave a seemingly good job, but one that stifles their potential; a stagnant relationship that breeds mediocrity and complacency; a financially secure lifestyle that chokes ambition and the will to challenge oneself to higher heights. Though I drove myself clear across the US to Los Angeles, I count myself among the groups of young people who exit those buses every Saturday to “make it,” though the majority will probably make little more than a mess of their lives. That’s because what a lot of us don’t know at the time of our arrival is that success begins internally. It’s a shimmer of light that can only shine brightly if we allow ourselves to grow, if we confront the fears we face by releasing the people, things, and situations that do not advance our ultimate journey, which is to move toward and then step into the greatness that exists within us. If you’re not aware of this, then it’s easy to flounder, to lose sight of your God-given gifts and miss the opportunities to develop them. For years after my move to LA, I’d been writing steadily then suddenly I stopped. I’d gotten a major book deal to write a memoir about my battles with clinical depression. Yet the more I wrote, the more afraid I became. I was afraid nobody would read the book; I was afraid everybody would read the book; I was afraid of the judgment that might be passed. The life I’d been living prior to the book deal was not by any means phenomenal, but it was familiar. My articles, radio commentaries and poetry readings had brought me a small bit of recognition. Still, for years, I’d had those daydreams, visions, of myself as an author, holding a book with my name printed on its cover, and I could feel that I was almost there, almost at the point where it could become a reality. But fear was paralyzing me, holding me in place, keeping me from growing and expanding in the ways that I needed to in order to cross that threshold. In 1994, I listened to Nelson Mandela deliver his inaugural speech, in which he quoted the author Marianne Williamson. Those words Mandela spoke changed my life: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” That day I started writing again in earnest and I didn’t stop until I’d completed my book. The fears didn’t instantly go away, but I wrote regardless. And even when those initial fears dissolved, new ones materialised to stand as obstacles to the next vision, the next dream. Such is the way of life, I suppose. You can’t reach the top of a mountain without making the climb, which is often fraught with impediments. A reverend at the church I used to attend advised me to think of the word “fear” as an acronym, standing for “False Evidence Appearing Real.” There is no proof that what you fear will happen, even if it has happened to someone else. That is their experience, not yours. So the next time you have a flash of yourself in the midst of happiness, serenity, and fulfilment, don’t brush it away. Accept it as the premonition it is, the reminder that we each hold the power to shine and if we summon the strength to allow ourselves to grow, to release whatever or whomever is holding us in place, making us a hostage of the familiar and the small, we will not only succeed, we will soar! “The View From Here,” a weekly column by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, is published every Friday in the Daily Graphic. Note: This article is not for reposting. Author email: outloud@danquah.com