A very dark road, just a little bit of a hazy moon …

And in the middle of it a rabbit …

A fast approaching car with high beams …

You can already see what will happen, right?

Fortunately we are not rabbits and we would never do something like this rabbit – you know – staying in the middle of the road, staring into the approaching light and not moving an inch!

Never!

Or would we? – Let’s see.

We will look at fear of heights. Not everybody has that fear so this example might not work for you, but many of us will be able to relate.

Imagine the ocean, a high cliff, we go close to the edge to take a look, and the depth seems to pull us down and we have to make an effort to stay back.

Isn’t this even worse than the situation with the rabbit, which only became frozen instead of being drawn into doom?

Twenty feet back from the cliff, on level ground, we have no problem going up very close to a line drawn in the sand. We might even put our toes a bit over the line without being in any danger of stepping over the line, short of being pushed. But there is nobody around, who would push anyway.

Now what is the difference between standing with the toes over this line in the sand and the line dividing land and ocean some 100 feet up?

I have no idea, but it sure is interesting to ponder. We can not really say anymore that we are so different from the rabbit which could easily just hop off the street and be safe.

I think there is a lesson to learn here. Could this be the effect that lets us run straight into misfortunes in life when things turn out dangerous?

An example is the burst of the internet bubble. How many investors lost their fortunes because they could not turn and hop away. They were frozen, spellbound by the falling charts, but they held on to their stocks because “it has to go up again!”

This burst was actually not that much of a burst. In the beginning of the grumbling there would have been plenty of time for those not frozen – and I am sure some were not – to get out and invest in real estate – something many did when it is way too late. So there seems to be the spellbound-factor.

I am trying to figure out why we do this. From an external point of view it would be very simple to just turn, and hop off the street. Why do we insist on continuing the same path, even if it scares the living daylight out of us?

One idea I came up with is the ego, that thing in us, or that part of us that Wayne Dyer describes as something in total need to be right. This part that makes us fight with the husband or wife we actually love – over minor disagreements.

We all probably know people who have this characteristic predominantly showing – going out of their way to prove to you that there are right, even if nobody denies. With a mental image of such a person in front of our inner eye – usually red-faced – we can nicely see that there is no way that this person would just turn and hop away. No SIR! Somebody might get the weird idea that he could be wrong!

So, if we don’t want to be right anymore, does that mean, we can just hop away and out of danger?

Does it mean that – facing some disaster in our life – we can just turn and walk away?

I sure hope so – – – – – but I better don’t need to be right about it!