Fear is arguably the cheapest and most readily available form of energy. The sense of belonging is a powerful tool to make the best use of this energy to help practicing freedom and happiness.

I think I always knew but did not want to know. Maybe because of not being aware where it came from and having no idea what to do with it. Maybe because of the imprinting of an education system that eludes some basic rules regarding life and death. Most probably because of personal indulgence and laziness. What I am talking about is fear and what to do with it. If you search on the internet, you will rapidly find long lists of fears, or the archetypes of personalities related to fear – similar to the seven dwarfs and snow white – as well as a number of more or less theoretical recipes to fight fear. To quote my friend Stefano Marguccio, I would say that “fear, like storytelling, has power, as it is at the core of our humanity, defining our success (or failure) as a species” and, I would add, as human beings. An urgent matter I had to deal with forced me to concretely dive into the obscure depths of fear, only to discover what I already knew inside me: that fear and wellbeing are intimately correlated. Join me, if you feel like, in the search of a possibly useful correlation.

I still feel the chills today thinking back to a time when, as a five-year-old boy, I would force myself to venture into the depths of our home’s long and dark corridor, where I imagined a monster hiding, ready to grab and swallow me. Fear would quickly overcome my curiosity, I would turn around, terrified and run for my life, towards the light coming from the kitchen at the other end of the corridor. I learned that, when needed, I could run pretty fast. A useful skill indeed, to be applied when my father would discover one of my numerous disasters, or later on in life when I picked up the bad habit to wake up late and risk missing the schoolbus. At that time, it was not clear to me why I felt attracted to such kind of situations, knowing that I would end up being scared. Today, I believe that I was simply amazed by the powerful and somewhat mysterious and supernatural physical reactions that fear was triggering in me. Huge jumps, fast runs, impossible climbs, the capacity to freeze… ( a hue feat for me, the youngest of seven children, who was known for being unable to stay put for a second). Not that I was always capable to manage well my reactions. I even suspect this was the main reason for my many visits to the hospital during my childhood to fix a broken leg or arm, or to get stitched up.

In general, we are quite skilled at describing fears and proposing some good reasons for when and why these are being triggered. Most parents have experienced Piaget’s theory of cognitive development when children leave the sensorimotor stage at age two to enter into the preoperational stage, which explains how, at that age, toddlers tend to suddenly stop accepting to be placed in the arms of strangers, show signs of fearing darkness and grow wary of the environment in which they move. We can also intuitively understand that the nature of the fears one experiences changes in relation to stages and practicalities of life, moving from fears of the dark to those linked to personal performances to end up in more socially related ones like illness-related fears, social status and so on. I feel even today that we are much less skilled in defining what to do with our fears, even less so with those arising from situations where medication seems to be the main way to treat them. As a globetrotting diplomat, I admit my total ignorance of matters related to psycho-educational definitions and treatments, and I gladly leave this subject to professionals and get back to focus on our journey.

In my life, and I suppose in anyone’s life, most fears come and go, like the ones I had for spiders and snakes or when I got for the first time on an airplane. In the past, I never took time to seriously analyse possible reasons for why they would disappear. I felt somehow comfortable with the idea that by learning, evolving and gaining experiences through life, I would use rationality to overcome and get rid of them. At the end, why I should be fearful of flying when statistics say that my life is at least a thousand times more in danger when crossing the streets of Rome, where I currently live, in the search for a good cappuccino?

But then, how do we deal with the disturbing fear of altitude or emptiness that interferes with the quality of your daily life, blocking your legs when looking down during a simple walk on the mountain, not to talk about even daring to think of crossing a suspension bridge or climbing the tower of Pisa? And why once, while walking on a mountain with family and friends, in a moment where I got captured by a sudden memory of the past at the sight of a fresco in a chapel painted by someone dear to me, I totally forgot to be afraid of the scaring ravine I had in front of me?  

The chance to better understand was offered to me when dealing with the urgent matter I was referring to in the introduction. After seven years of successful negation, I finally capitulated and allowed modern medicine to diagnose a cancer that, meanwhile, had grown to a metastatic stage. By the way, it is a pure coincidence that the stages are four, the same number as the ones of cognitive development described by Piaget. Put in crude terms by a South African doctor friend of mine, I was dying, and my kids would not thank me for having done nothing to prevent this to happen. What followed was fast and furious action to avoid wasting any more time. We confirmed the diagnose through a pet scan, defined the clinical protocol, installed a device to avoid demolishing my veins during treatment, and off we went. Going through the chemo cycle by cycle, while the tumours shrank like snow in the sun, my internal organs’ condition deteriorated to the point that my body was literally fading away, leading me to clearly distinguish the limit between life and death. It was during this journey that my fear of dying, that once paralyzed me at Zurich airport when travelling back from Dar Es Salaam seeking a definitive diagnose, metamorphosed into happiness, and an incredible sensation of freedom.

This transformation occurred suddenly, at the end of a series of stages (again) I rapidly went through during this adventure. Negation was the first, followed by rage when the diagnose was confirmed. Third came surrender in the hope to go through the chemo as a witness, and finally I realized that I had to emotionally take the lead of the cure. This was the very moment fear of death powerfully kicked in, when I realized that death is a personal matter after all and that even though pharaohs and the emperor Qui Shi Huang were buried with slaves or clay warriors, we end up alone in our last terrestrial endeavour. Astonished, I came to the conclusion that fear of death had nothing to do with death (this will eventually just happen when our time comes) but with energy. The famous saying “run for your life” means that under the influence of fear we actually manage to free an unexpected amount of kinetic energy which can lead to impressive performances. The only problem is that we do not know how to control or make the best use of it:  a panic attack is another way to use the very same energy, only to stop us in our tracks.

Moved by both determination and being fed up with my physical suffering, I intuitively started to learn to focus my attention on the details of my life as a patient. By observing a leave falling from a tree, or a last bee flying around as if it were drunk, or the drop of the chemo entering in my body, I slowly managed to shrink my attention to the now, stopping the swinging between past and future, typical of us human being who tend to organize our lives based on comparisons. Simply enjoying the present had the powerful effect of erasing all sources of suffering. Curiosity did the rest. Being at the same time curious, neither suffering nor being concerned about my future, had the effect of taking me out of the centre stage of my own life. I became an observer with a strong awareness about everything and everyone around me. I could feel the breath of the trees, the emotions and thoughts of the nurses. I could understand the suffering of others without getting influenced by it. I learned to switch on and off this form of lucid understanding at will and to help others in similar conditions to make a step towards their own journey of awareness, without pretending to define diagnoses or offer cures – just helping to learn how to experience a bit of joy. Reducing at times the pressure of their own fears was enough to me.

After this experience, for some time I did not analyse the process I went through. It was enough to have kept this capacity to focus on the now at will even when I went back to my regular life. Then I thought time was the main factor that brought me to this knew kind of knowledge, since during the chemo I did not have anything else to do anyway. But one day, all became clear. It happened while drinking a cappuccino in my favourite bar. I was happily seated watching the way the barman and waiters were attending to the clients and I felt for a moment that we were a single family, even though we were clearly an heterogeneous crowd with a mix of regular clients, foreigners and tourists. I recognized the same qualitative energy I felt during my healing process and I finally got the point: it was about the sense of belonging that we were all feeling in that bar at that very moment.

The sense of belonging triggers a virtuous cycle enhancing energetically the meaning of who we are and what we do, giving purpose to every moment of our life.

While the notion of belonging is more often used for exclusion than not, I witnessed several times the activation of the virtuous cycle of inclusion: through the nurses holding my hands when I thought I was dying, through my spouse, who fought for my life to the point of getting emotionally and physically drained by six months of immense support, through the young professional with whom I shared a food-related project. The sense of belonging is rapidly evolving through digitalization and its infinite ways to connect.

It would be great if there was a way to support initiatives to offer people in need the possibility to experience the power of a renewed sense of belonging. This could happen by developing a network of virtually interconnected physical spaces of rooted belonging to help others to have a glimpse of what being fully focused with mind, heart and body in the now brings in terms of happiness. It might even lead to feel somewhat free in this guided tour on our mother Earth that we call life.