We romanticize the past because fear has been stripped away from it.

We spoil the present because fear still clouds it.

The tragedy is that life keeps proving we can survive the worst—

yet we cannot stop fearing the next thing.

Understanding why fear is part of our story might be the key to wisdom itself.

That's the point of the following quote by Arthur C. Benson ---

"After living a full life—seeing much, enjoying much, and enduring much—a person often looks back and feels a quiet dissatisfaction.

Their days weren’t ruined, but they were always slightly shadowed by the sense that happiness was never quite as pure as they had hope.

So they turn their thoughts to the old scenes of love and companionship.

They call up memories from the darkness, like flipping through an old photo album, and gently retouch them.

They remove the worries, the disappointments, and especially the fears—transforming the past not into what it actually was,

but into what it might have been: warmer, softer, more golden.

Thomas Carlyle nailed it when he said the reason memories of the past always look so beautiful is because the fear has been taken out of them.

It is fear of what may happen and what must eventually happen that overshadows our present happiness.

Remove fear, and we would be truly happy.

Yet here’s the strange paradox: even though we’ve survived our darkest and saddest experiences completely unscathed,

we never seem to learn not to be afraid.

If we could only understand why fear is woven so deeply into human life,

we would have solved a great part of the riddle of the world."

It's no mystery why the Bible says "Fear not" near 365 times.