What's the obstacle to being open to all the possibilities in your life...?

In the middle of January I was away from home attending a conference where Benjamin Zander was one of our featured speakers.  He started out his talk by asking us to envision what it is that prevented each of us from being open to all of the possibilities in our lives.  One word popped into my head, a word that I would say has dominated my thoughts for as long as I can remember. 

Fear.

Fear of spiders.  Fear of the dark.  Fear of heights.  Fear of losing financial security.  Fear of losing the love of my wife and children. Fear of being found out to be not nearly good enough.  Fear of loss – of anything and everything.  More fear of spiders.

But just a day before Benjamin Zander's talk, I got a lot more to fear than just arachnids.  I had a follow-up phone call with my doctor and he was not happy about something...  A month earlier I had a routine set of blood tests performed as part of an application for additional life insurance through my employer.  Right before Christmas my blood chemistry test had come back with an unusually low globulin level and I received in effect a "Dear John" letter from the insurance company.  Now, I wasn't about to take this laying down...  I am an A type personality, or so I have been told by others who I really feel are not nearly interested enough in understanding and impacting the things around them.  I mean, don’t you just hate the word “whatever” when it is uttered as the world’s shortest description of a philosophy?  If the fate of the world were left to people like that we would still be living in caves, or never have been interested in mastering fire…  I like sushi, but steak tartar? 

Where was I?  Oh, yes, I am a type A personality and decided that I would simply have to understand this.  So I went to my primary doctor just after the start of the year and asked him to run some tests to understand what all of this meant.  The follow up call I received right before Benjamin Zander's talk changed my little corner of the world, more than a little, but fortunately less than a lot up to now ...