I. Fear

I said I didn’t want it to be the dominant emotional vibration in my life, that it wasn’t that “useful”. He said fear is the reason humans exist on this planet: an evolutionary necessity that saved our hides.
I had to question my choice of the word “useful”.

Is there a difference between making decisions based on fear – of what might happen as a result of our actions or inaction – and the understanding of what consequences result from our actions or inaction? Thirty-year olds don’t put their hands on hot stove tops. Because they fear the impending sensation, or know it?

Or remember it…? Unclear as to whether the initial feeling of fear that surrounded learning the sensation of burning skin is separate from the seemingly uncharged knowledge we currently own; few of us sweat when approaching our cooking appliances. That would potentially change drastically if we were approaching the rubble of a building that was bombed while we were inside it. I’ve only begun to dig into research on this - parts of the brain involved in fear-based learning, fear’s role in our development. But apart from the science of it, there must be some insight we’ve gained from experience: how valuable is fear?

The word itself has many synonyms (courtesy of thesaurus.com:)
abhorrence, angst, anxiety, awe, bête noire, chickenheartedness, cold feet*, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, dismay, disquietude, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, horror, jitters, phobia, presentiment, recreancy, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry…

Some clue us in to the multifaceted nature of fear (foreboding…), some are hard to believe (reverence?). It’s comforting that it isn’t all definable as cowardice, which brings to mind the spectrum of experience on which we can learn to recreate a physiological or behavioral response of confrontation or avoidance. I don’t feel jittery about failure, but I know the angst of its potential advent has foiled many a hobby, performance, story. Hardly advantageous. Not knowing where my next job was coming from at NPR elicited dread, worry, anxiety. I did everything I could to change that situation, but the eventual acknowledgement that it’s beyond your control is paralyzing. Can not say it was beneficial, considering the conventional mantra there (“Something ALWAYS works out.”) proved true, and my nerves were already threadbare.

However – fear has always been a great teacher, in that the more I recognize it, the more determined I am to not let it stop me, control me, or shake me from my center. It consistently challenges me to discover where my boundaries are, and why my mind has the habit of seeing a limitation as solid when it is illusory. It shows me the line between courage and carelessness (a friend’s book on Hawaii reminds travelers not to fear the water, but their bad judgment). It urges me to question what is rational and what isn’t; it illuminates and clarifies the depth of my desire and determination. And in deference to perhaps the most crucial part of our evolution: it is the contrast, the antonym, the opposite of love. Fear is an immediate reminder that love exists, and -I would argue- is much more powerful.

Agree?