Fear

There's a small pile of topics and works in progress that linger and linger, and then linger even longer. Either they're too important to be tackled lightly or frivolously, or they are just too silly to be written in anything but the exactly correct frame of mind. This is one of the former as it is important or personal for practically everyone. What am I going to waffle on about with great abandon? Fear.

At some point I became scared, and it's hard to know why. It wasn't knowledge of mortality kicking into action (apparently the last major brain/personality development that occurs) but something else: A fear of exposure, of doing new things or even old things done many times before. It spread to everything like a malaise of the spirit magnified many times over. Books that I know and love suddenly have an attached stigma, movies that are personal heirlooms become ever so slightly scary and every trip to the swimming pool begins with shedding the nerves that should have stopped long ago. It's a madness, but a very human one.

Fear lives within us all. For some it's so small as to be ignored while in others it's trampled deliberately underfoot as they try to conceal it with arrogance and over-confidence. The fear remains though, as it always will. My own method has taken a long time to mature but it essentially consists of doing whatever it is anyway, either extremely thoughtfully and methodically or spontaneously when fear is looking the other way. Why did it spring up the way it did? Bad things must have happened and that's enough said as I don't really know what they were.

What is it that people are scared of though? Death? Failure? Mutant wheels of cheese rolling around the landscape in the far future? What is it? For me it is exposure and to a lesser extent failure, an inbuilt layer of insecurity and a void of self-confidence that revels in hiding itself away and persisting. There's only one way to remove a void though, and that is to expose it and watch it slowly fill in from the atmosphere all around it until it is barely a scratch on an admittedly uneven surface. Just go out and do the things you need to do, if you know what they are, and then rest.

One day there won't be so much fear around; there won't be so many wars of politics and ideologies, but we will all still fret a little personally. Perhaps the best thing to remember is that all of the greatest successes are preceded by dozens of ridiculously overblown failures, and it is those failures that set the context for how great a success is. So fear not, every fear but that of death is magnified and out of proportion, and death itself is out of our control and we don't have to live with the consequences. It is manageable.

Fear is also a powerful tool for action at pivotal moments or destruction if it's not properly harnessed. More on that on another day.

O.