Fear

Fear 

...is the primary emotion. Without fear, none of us would be here.  We would never have survived the depredations of the wild, hostile world into which we were cast to make our way eons ago.  And this vestigial fear remains to help us navigate the somewhat less hostile environment we find ourselves in today.  But fear also holds us back from becoming what we know we are capable of becoming.  Someone once said that we are not afraid of the dark; we are instead afraid of the light that is within us, the powerful, 'fearful' ability we know we have within ourselves that, once unleashed, will change the world.  This fear is well founded;  those who have changed the world--Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Norman Borlaug, Margaret Sanger, Barbara Jordan, and many others were ordinary, seemingly unexceptional people.  But they realized early on that the light they held within, restrained or damped, would leave their lives bereft of meaning.  Their only fear was in trying to contain their power.  We can all be thankful that they were unable to do so.

Fear is the one thing that unites us as humans; fear is also that which must be overcome if we are to be fully human.