Horse dung, girlfriend. This is my mantra for tough times; a nudge to believe in the power of as-yet-unknown possibilities, not in my fears. Odd mantra? Let me explain.

See, it could take just one unexpected event to change the whole course of your life. And we don’t want that, so our minds keep running different scenarios and we tend to become obsessed with if-this-then-that kind of meticulous thinking. But, when the worst happens, we suddenly see just how useless all our calculations were.

As a point in case, I keep thinking about this story I once read: Husband and wife talking. They just got a puppy for their three young children and kept working out what the breed’s expected life span is and how old the children would be when the little dog finally dies one day; worrying how each child would deal with this – his or her first experience of death.

So, the unexpected happens. Husband and children are killed and the woman stays behind, walking the little dog each afternoon, thinking how futile all their careful calculations were.

Horse dung is the positive side of you-never-know-what’s-going-to-happen. The first time I heard the anecdote I was in my mid-twenties and it has remained a source of hope ever since. It goes like this: Somewhere in the mid-1800’s a great British mind forecasted that, keeping the population explosion in mind, the entire London would be knee deep in horse dung by the year 1900-and-something.

Stuck with the image of a horse-drawn carriage, this forecaster couldn’t foresee the invention of the motorcar – the one unforeseen thing that changed everything. Horse dung reminds me that I don’t have to know; I don’t have to estimate and calculate. I just have to trust that the solution I cannot foresee is already waiting for me.

Does this help me to live fearlessly? As if! Fear remains huge, but I take Elizabeth Gilbert’s advice on this. Stop running from fear, turn around, look it in the eye and ask fear what it wants you to do. The answer is always “nothing”. Fear wants you to lie in a dark room with a damp cloth over your eyes.

The point is not to suppress your fear. Christy Whitman says that you don’t want to be devoid of fear or worry, concern, disappointment, frustration, even sadness, because those emotions are informing you. Feel it, she says. Let it inform you. Let it flow right through you so that it can drain out. 

In the process of allowing emotions to rise to the surface, many of us come upon old, you can almost say fossilized, feelings that got stuck. Rob Schwartz says that if you don’t go into aversion and try to push these frozen or trapped energies away, if you can remain neutral and just witness whatever is arising, it unfreezes so that it can now be released.

Rob says this process has four steps: One, be consciously aware of it. Two, to the extent that you can do so sincerely, thank whatever it is that’s coming up for whatever it has taught you. Three, bless it. Four, set an intention to give it to the universe for transformation.

If you allow yourself to be who you are, you accept even your negative thoughts without fear. In ‘Sensitive is the new strong’, Anita Moorjani writes that these thoughts come through you and they pass. They’re just thoughts and all of them contribute to making you who you are.

Anita’s slogan is “Love yourself as if your life depends on it, because it does.” She says that you always want to bring yourself to a space where you’re feeling more loved. Always. So, love yourself and find joy in this moment. If you’re not feeling joy, do what lifts your spirits so that you can be at your most elevated self.

She says that bad things happening act as an invitation for her to love herself more. Ask yourself: How can I allow more good things in my life? How can I find more joy in myself, in my life? What are the things that make me happy? As long as you do the best you can with the present moment, you’ll be allowing the best possible future to unfold.

As-yet-unknown possibilities are waiting for you and they’re far more fascinating than anything you can imagine right now. Horse dung, girlfriend. Horse dung.