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Issue/Publication: Perfectly Cursed Life

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Fear is the most primal and yet the most peculiar sensation.  It can cause us to do incredible things and lead us to create unbelievable messes.  We can conquer it, but we can never rid ourselves of it.  We can succumb to it but it can never, in and of itself, destroy us.  It’s so powerful and yet lacks the power to completely run us forever.

I’m thinking of this as I watch my dog hunt for a place in the house that is warm and safe.  It’s raining outside and I’ve seen a few bolts of lightning.  Rocky is afraid of thunderstorms.  I will never forget that first month we had him and went away for a weekend to my father-in-law’s “shack” in the woods.  It stormed unbelievably the next morning.  And when I stepped out of the shower, there was Rocky, on the shower mat, waiting for me to save him.  This dog who can scare off a mailman in a single bark is scared of thunderstorms.

Rocky’s penchant for hiding during a storm makes me consider my own actions in times of fear.  Do we all have the same urge to hide or do we do something more?  The thing I remember most about fear is laughter.  It sounds wholly incompatible, but I swear it’s true.  If I’m scared, I laugh.  It’s not a full-bodied laughter that can turn into a cackle. Yet it’s more than a giggle.  It’s a gut-wrenching emotion that forms into a subtle sound that defies comparison.

When I was little and in trouble, as most little kids are, I would laugh.  My grandfather used to warn me that little girls that laughed like that were soon to cry.  I don’t know if this was keen observation on his part, or mere speculation, but he was right.  (For the record he also used to tell me that I’d “be alright by time I got married,” and although he was right about that for some things, there are others for which neither time nor marriage was the remedy.)

Today I was in a situation where I was legitimately fearful.  It involved work and it wasn’t dangerous (physically, anyhow).  But for a good half hour, I was stuck in a circle of what-ifs with a multitude of what-fors.  And instead of laughing, and instead of hiding, I somehow became a bit free.  There might have been a storm on the horizon, but I was focused on the aftermath.  And as anyone knows, aftermath can mean a great many things.

A blogging friend mentioned confusion today.  In a gut-reaction response, I commented that confusion is the root of all creation (though it wasn’t as poetically worded as that at the time).  Think about it: from the confusion of The Big Bang came life as we know it.  From the aftermath of the Great Depression came an era of unparallelled prosperity.  From the minute we start replicating cells, there’s always a chance for confusion.  And it’s that moment before confusion that fear sets in.  Fear, in some ways, is what drives us to do something different.

At least if we let it do the right thing.

Although I admire FDR, I adamatly disagree that fear itself is all we have to fear.  We have famine, we have plagues, we have economic ruin and we have emotional turmoil.  What fear allows us to do is to make a choice amongst the confusion–either we allow the fear to free us or we search for shelter.  Survival causes the best and the worst in us, but either way it allows us the most room for discovery.

I can’t say I learned anything just yet from my reaction to fear, but I can say that I’m starting to recognize where I might one day learn something.  At least one time I broke my typical reaction to fear.  The domino effect may not be instantaneous, but somewhere I’ve changed something and set a new plan of events into play.

Primal urges lead to raw emotions.  Raw emotions lead to choices.  Either we chose to hide from the confusion or we chose to do something with it.  I’m not saying there’s a standard right answer.  That would be incredibly ignorant.

The thing about fear is it pushes us.  That’s it.  It’s not comfortable, but that’s precisely why it works so well. If we were comfortable, why would we move in the first place?   Rocky wouldn’t search for shelter and I wouldn’t laugh like a hyenna, and while that might be a temporarily good thing, what kind of life is that?

Being afraid sucks. But fear creates.