What is fear? Where do we learn it?
Unlike every other emotion we can cultivate and discard like love, hatred or wonder, fear seems to be different from any other emotion, it's like a glue that comes off better never dries off.
I have spent quite some time watching babies grow, looking at how unperturbed they seem by the very things that could kill them in an instant. A baby would practically crawl off a ten story building or into a moving train if there were no one to hinder them. Why aren't they afraid? Why aren't they trembling. With growth comes Fear, and some would say that this fear is innate to our survival, for the thing that scares us build up our defence mechanisms. Yes, even a mad man who has lost his sanity watches both sides of the express lane before crossing it. Fear! What exactly are we scared of? What triggers our anxiety so much that it cripples us. Is it why the holy book had a quantifiable amount of 365 "Fear Not" in its text, one for each day as some reviewers would say?
Maybe, just maybe we should prioritise our fears, be choosy of the things that trembles us because I mean as a kid I used to be afraid of ghosts, now I don't mind seeing them.
Knock, Knock
Who's there?
I am a ghost
Come in, have a seat, do you want a cup of tea?
Should you dig it, aren't many humans more scary than ghosts?
Our fears build up our defence mechanisms, but like the medical situation where a person's immune system mistakenly identifies healthy cells, tissues, or organs as foreign and attacks them, leading to tissue damage and organ dysfunction, fear hinders our ability to function.
Can we sit with our fears? Can we label them them for exactly what they are?
What if it doesn't make sense?
What if no likes me?
What if I fail?
The questions of what ifs are never ending, that is the spiral of anxiety, the crux of trembling.
Can we sit with our trembling and accept it as a psychological impotence that we can adopt as babies and continue to live.
I could fail but I got to live
No one may like me but I've got to live
I could fail but I got to try.
Damn the whole of human existence is a case of fear and trembling and more often than I've come to realize it's the very people who accept their trembling and continue to live that live a life worthy of living.
Tomorrow I'll have new fears, discarding older ones, ever living with the fears I'll have to throw away as quickly as I can because the line between stupidity and courage is so thin anyone can hardly tell the difference. The goal is to live, and to live without the crumbling effect of unrealized hopes buried in the heap of unsubstantiated anxieties.
Be scared, but live anyways.
