The night before an IRONMAN race I do not sleep well. I lie in bed at 10pm, then 1am, then 2am, watching the alarm get closer. My head runs through everything that could go wrong in the morning. The wetsuit will tear. The bike will not start. My legs will be empty. By 3am I am exhausted before the race has begun.
Anyone who has spent a night waiting for something big to arrive in the morning knows this restlessness. Arjuna knew it too. In the Gita he tells Krishna, my mind is restless, turbulent, powerful, and stubborn. Controlling it feels as hard as controlling the wind. (Bhagwad Gita 6.34)
For a long time I thought the answer was to make the fear go away. Sleep more, breathe more, trust more. None of it worked the night before a race. The fear always came.
The teaching that finally helped me came from a Gita talk I heard recently. Its central line: fear is only the imagination of future sorrow. It has no connection to what is happening. Holding on to fear does not remove the sorrow that may come tomorrow. The fear becomes its own pain, separate from whatever happens.
I tested it against my own night-before, and it worked. The wetsuit was hanging in my room. The bike was ready. The legs were under the sheets. The disaster was only in my head.
This does not make the fear disappear. The mind keeps imagining because that is what minds do. You start watching the fear the way you would watch a movie, and let it play, on an endless loop.
If something big is waiting for you in the morning, the fear in your head right now is something your mind is making up. The thing you are afraid of has not happened. It may not happen at all. Tonight, there is only you, the room you are in, and the breath you are taking. When the imagination comes, notice it as imagination. Go back to the breath, the room, and this moment.
That is the work for tonight.
The Gita also has a longer answer that Krishna gives in the very next verse. He acknowledges that the mind is hard to control. Then He says it can be brought under your hand by abhyasa and vairagya, by practice and by detachment. (Bhagwad Gita 6.35)
Practice is the daily return to the work the event demands. For me it is the hours of training. For someone else, preparation, or pages of study, or rehearsal. By the morning of the thing, your body has the memory of all the times you have done it before. That memory carries you through.
Detachment is much harder. It is the daily reminder that the result of any one event does not define your life. Each time, you do your best work and let the result be what it is. The next event will have a little less power over you. This is the work you do over the years.
The fear before any major event today is smaller than it was the first time. It has not gone away. It just takes up less space.