I find myself in a heavy slumber, not totally asleep, but barely awake. The day ends and I settle into my phone to catch up on news, Giants baseball, changes in technology, or some article that seems important to my constant urge to learn something new or to better understand the world. We get the kids to bed and my wife and I turn on Netflix for an hour. Then she drifts to bed and I drift back to all that numbing information. I know the stream never ends and I drift along with it until I force myself ashore to the human need of sleep.
This is consumption.
Every once in a while—sometimes more frequently—I get these urges. I pull out my phone, open my social media app, and my thumbs hover over the glowing keyboard. I’m about to share some thought or idea or observation and I pause to examine the sensation.
I have a lot of it. Part of it is the control freak in me—I want things to go my way; I want things to be done the way I would do them. And part of it is simply my inability to accept—people as they are, circumstances, life. Certainly I would be more at peace if I could consistently stop resisting and 
I know my answer: fear. Pretty simple. I hate admitting that and saying it out loud, but it’s real. As I look forward to another day, another month, another year, the one thing I want focus on is accepting my fear and moving beyond it. I want to continue to work on letting go of the phantoms of things that haven’t been because of my fear—fear of judgment, fear of failure, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of doing too much, fear of doing too little, fear of not being the husband or dad I want to be, fear of not being the man I want to be…so. many. fears. They’re not debilitating fears, but everywhere in my life I can see the remnants of decisions based on fear.