Fear, though unpleasant, is an emotion we need. Its purpose is to keep us alive. People have different degrees of fear, and about different things. We fear according to what we were taught to fear. We fear according to our experiences.
We are actually born with some fears (of snakes, spiders, rats and such) due to evolutionary influences. People can have their own unique fears, and, due to differences in brain chemistry, some people fear more intensely than others.
I used to take walks with a neighbor —since moved away to a gated, green-cement-lawned community in Phoenix. We would walk around Shakespeare Park or to Academy Hill. Pastoral places. But he would never, ever walk on the grass—asphalt only—for fear of stepping in dog poop. One day, while heading home after a lovely tour on Shakespeare’s macadam, he stepped in dog poop on the sidewalk. Of course, at first it struck me as hysterically, ironically funny. I did not expect hilarity from him, just something like disgust. What I saw was horror and fear. He howled. He shook. He jerked out of his Hush Puppies, and hurled them in the street. He held his head and kept howling. What I was looking at was an intense phobic reaction. I collected his shoes, bagged them at the house, and drove him home. No longer would I tease him about avoiding dog poop. Dog poop was Kryptonite to him. Dog poop, to him, was something to be very, very afraid of.
There are varieties and degrees of fear, such as phobia, dread, worry, alarm. We can identify the origin of some. Some we cannot. A friend of the family was terrified of dogs. He did not know why. My son was badly bitten by a dog when he was four years old, yet he’s always loved dogs. Who would think? There are people whose emotional atmosphere is fear. My sister-in-law would only drive on the side roads, never I-95. She had three locks on every door of her sturdy home, would not allow her son to have a bicycle, never had an ordinary, pleasurable relationship because, and I’m quoting her, “I don’t want to get involved.” (Translation: “I am afraid.”} Fear ran through every cell of her body. She—and I loved her—was afraid to live.
The main human fears, beside their individual, peculiar and particular fears, are, according to “Scientific American”:
-fear of the Unknown
-fear of Death
-fear of being rejected
-fear of being judged
-fear of failure.
We all, from time to time, experience these fears to one degree or another. We all keep our fears pretty much to ourselves. Men, particularly, are not supposed to be afraid because they are assumed to be our protectors. There is nothing worse for a man than to be called a coward.
It’s always been strange to me that humans like to be scared. That is, people like to feel fear when they feel safe as in a staged threat— a creepy movie, the roller coaster, a haunted house. The reason people like this kind of fright is because, after the fear response, when they intellectually understand that they are safe, that the threat is unreal, then the body actually releases dopamine, which gives them the feeling of relief and even pleasure! (Wonky, but true.)
The world is scary. Always has been. Tsunamis, Jack the Ripper, rogue elephants, Vlad the Impaler, Covid, earthquakes, Pol Pot, alligators, THE BOMB, etc. But we must not allow our fears to control our lives. Here is a poem about fear I’ve always loved:
Fear
by Kahlil Gibran
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
