In his play Othello, William Shakespeare shows incredible insight into the inner workings of two "forces of stress", fear and
anger.
These can be seen gradually destroying Othello's peace of mind as the play unfolds.
Fear
and its accomplice anger combine as jealousy and vengefulness, and drive Othello out of his mind. The play perfectly illustrates how these two can have our love - and real self
- overthrown and cast aside.
Even as he falls into the trap, Othello anticipates his fate:
Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throneTo tyrannous hate!
What surely would have kept Othello safe were those fear
and anger antidotes, courage
and trust. Then, all defensiveness he’d have laid to rest, so to embrace the only state of play that the heart will entertain: naked faithfulness.
Without heart, love comes in fits and starts, then departs. As observed by Shakespeare’s Portia - in The Merchant of Venice -
“other passions” can take love to “excess”; and not just “green-eyed jealousy” and “shuddering fear”, but “despair”.
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But if Shakespeare shines a light into the human mind, how can we recover from states like jealousy?
The key to success, here, is to recognise something like jealousy the same way we do a viral infection - as an illness
just as threatening to our health, well-being and potential.
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Each of us has a "person within the person" - the true
- creative self that stays undaunted by
fear and too powerful to be taken over by the likes of
anger.
To recover our personal creativity - and embody our creative self - we need to become more and more aware of any presence within us of the likes of fear
and anger... and we need to be more embracing towards the "bigger" part of our nature, or, as the ancients might have put it, our heart.