Fear

The Biggest Fear


The paperback edition of the book my heavily disguised widowed dating/remarriage experience appears in is coming out in several months and the author asked if I would be willing to complete a Proust questionnaire for the appendix. Aside from feeling honored, I always like to write about myself, experiences, and feelings.

But the first question stumped me. Rob says I am just being chicken, but I don’t think so. I really don’t know how to answer it.

What is your biggest fear?

I don’t have a bigger than another fear. I don’t think I even fear things as much as I worry incessantly and run worst case scenarios on a worn out loop in the worry corner of my mind.

I used to fear never having an opportunity to experience those milestone events that we are supposed to. Like love. Marriage. Motherhood. And then I feared failing.  At Everything. Whatever the situation or great life event – I would be a failure.

But I have had opportunities. Even back in the day when I was lamenting my lack of them, they were really there. I just didn’t see them through the haze of cultural expectations.

So once I had marriage and baby and career, I feared being outed as a fake. The discovery that I was only pretending to know what I was doing but it was all just so much smoke and strategic placement of mirrors would ruin me and sending me in search of the deepest darkest cave to live out my remaining days in shame.

And when that didn’t happen, then it was loss. I feared losing what I had. Husband and child and job and home and earthly possessions – most of which came from Target.

But at some point I looked around and realized most of the things I feared were silly or were beyond my ability to do anything other than simply live beyond them. Fear sort of subsided to worry at that point – which is a problem when it results in life halting inertia – but is actually quite manageable and survivable.

Now I just have knowledge. Not that I particularly want it. In some ways fear is better because it is a sign of innocence. My innocence is consigned to the past. Bad things have happened. Bad things will again. If the past is any indicator of my survival, I’ll deal as I have always done. Where is the fear then?

In 1995 I traveled out West with my folks to visit CB and his then wife. On the trip back we found ourselves in a tiny prop plane flying in circles over the Iowa cornfields in a vain attempt to go around a thunderstorm. At one point we hit some wicked turbulence, and the plane dropped like a dead duck. It felt like that initial stomach flop one experiences as the car heads over and down the first drop on a roller coaster. Only from much higher up. Mom was in tears and Dad had his arms around her, trying to calm her. I was in the seat across the aisle by myself, and he looked over and asked,

“Are you afraid?” which was strange because I think he knew that I wasn’t.

“It’s a little late for that,” I told him. Because it was. Fear is only useful if it keeps you out of potentially dangerous situations. We were on the plane. The storm was raging and rocking us about the dark clouds. Fear was less useful than paying attention and keeping one’s wits.

The same thing applies now. I have confronted most of the fears of my younger years at some point or another. It hasn’t cured my innate need to worry, but I don’t know that I am necessarily afraid of anything. And I wonder too. Are those things we label “fears” simply unknowns and would it make more sense to call them “worries”? Or, is fear more about our reactions than about the thing itself?

Damn you, Proust.

On My Own


This weekend will mark the first time in about six months that I have been on my own. A family crisis has called Rob away and I will be holding down the fort. I put on a brave face and told Rob not to worry I could handle everything. Which is in fact true. There is little I couldn’t manage should it come up and the odds of anything out of the ordinary arising are, as we all know intellectually, amazing small. Still, I am not all that brave or all that resourceful or even all that at ease with being just me and child for a even a couple of days.

The key, of course, is to keep busy and there are plenty of things that need to get done. It’s not that easy at night however. Once my daughter is asleep and it is just me and this computer and all the creaks and groans of an old house out in a rural hamlet. Sounds I normally don’t pay any attention to because they have become so familiar are suddenly unrecognizable and even menacing. I have already fallen back into my old habit of leaving all the hall lights on. I even caved in to my little one (after telling my husband that I wouldn’t) and she is curled up asleep next to me.

Once upon a time, I slept blissfully alone in my own home. No husband or child or cat. What happened to her I wonder?

Fear


“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Isn’t that what President Roosevelt once told a worried nation? It wasn’t true in the strictest sense but the implication was clear enough. Fear is paralyzing and if you let it, it can rule and ultimately ruin your life as surely as whatever it is you are so deeply worried about or afraid of. I got to thinking about fear again after my husband sent me a link to a column by SF Gate’s Mark Morford. He is so left of center you would need to use GoogleEarth to pinpoint his exact location, and his ability to string a tongue contorting sentence together via adjectives and comparative phrases can sometimes overwhelm the thought train, but he usually makes a point somewhere in the verbiage. A point that is often barbed and an equal opportunity contempt-er. The column was entitled Welcome home, have some gunfire/Nothing like returning from vacation to the dulcet sounds of hardcore street violence, no? It was about urban violence and the way it effects and affects us. And it was about fear and the fearful way we live in this new brave new world of the 21st century. Although I don’t believe that we as a people are more violent, or are even more prone to violence, now than at any time in the past, I do believe that those of us who make up the washed masses are for the first time in a long while less shielded from it. You would think a liberal like Morford would see this as a good thing. A leveler whose time had come. I think, like most people who find themselves more or less face to face with danger and the in your face reality that characterizes the lives of so many more people than we of the “cleanliness” class wish to acknowledge, that it is too breath-taking, and not in a good way, for us to wrap thought processes around. Here is an excerpt:

 

To me, such harsh events merely serve to highlight the simple, but

incredibly potent choice: Would you like to move through your life in

ever-diminishing circles of trepidation? Would you like to live in a vague

sort of dread of what might lie around the next corner or behind the next

door or at the next stoplight? Because baby, you certainly can.

  It can affect every aspect of life. Would you like to be perpetually

worried about, say, getting into a debilitating accident every time you

start your car? Would you like to live in constant low-level fear of

robbery, of lightning storms, Internet scams and lead paint and a big

black Escalade slamming into your Accord at 90 mph? How about getting shot

at the liquor store or getting assaulted while jogging or accidentally

tripping on your shoelaces as you walk by a giant picture window and

crashing screamingly through the glass and tumbling 50 floors to your very

graphic and bloody and cinematic death? Hey, all you have to do is tune

into it, and it’s yours.

  And here’s the great divine kicker: The more you worry about it, the more

you abide in fear and anxiety, the more likely such trauma and drama will

happen to you. It’s the Great Inverse Law of Energy: What you fear most

will be drawn to you like a magnet. And the universe goes: Ha.

 

I don’t believe in the law of catastrophic attraction. I don’t believe in the laws of attraction period. The idea that you can think your way to any particular state of being is popular with the kinds of people who would rather not have to work for anything. Like my five year old, they believe in magic wands and sitting on their hands waiting for the timer to ding and release them from their situations like school children at day’s end. It also sits well with those who need excuses and places to lay blame to make it through their lives free from the inconvenience of personal responsibility and self-fulling expectations. 

 

Bad things don’t happen to you because you worry that they might. The Twin Towers didn’t fall as a result of someone worrying that they would. People don’t have heart attacks, get hit by automobiles or die from any number of diseases because they thought or over-thought the possibility. We are finite and frail, and we have constructed a world that can be hazardous to us, although the world before we began renovating it wasn’t overly user friendly either. Those of us who are cognizant of that spend time thinking about it now and then, and those of us who have experienced some of the very worst life has to throw at us range somewhere from yellow to orange on the alert scale thereafter. But whether our actions put us in harms way or not is simply the randomness we call reality, no one worries themselves to the point of attracting the negative attention of the universe because the universe already knows what is going to happen based on the law of probability that generally bears it out.

 

Morford does make one good point.

 

Because truth is, you are never far from the suffering and the hell. You

are never, ever completely immune, even on your most delightful and mellow

post-vacation days. The wolf is always — and I do mean always — at the

door. It is merely a question of whether or not you wish to simply see him

and smell him and give him a moment of respect before moving on, or

actually stop, and give in, and offer him the meat from your tired and

world-wary bones.

 

When lightning strikes the first question asked is “why me?” The answer is why not you? No one is special to the point of avoiding pain, suffering, despair, loneliness and grief. We are all vulnerable. The phrase “There, but for the grace of God, go I” exists for just that reason. It is “grace” from some unknown source that spares some of us from some tragedies, but it won’t protect all of us all of the time. And it’s not a bad thing to be aware of it. Giving some thought to the “what ifs” can help prepare a person for when disaster strikes; however, it can also serves as a reminder to live each day mindfully, if not always with full gratitude, because you never do know and regrets can leave life-long scars that can do far more damage than worrying about the possibility of acquiring them ever would.

 

I guess the Boy Scouts were on to something with their “Be prepared!” motto. I would add to that just one word. Live. Be prepared to live. Worry within reason. Expect to be your own salvation when tragedy strikes and be grateful if you don’t have to be. And live. Just live. In the moment and for the future with only occasionally glances back to keep your bearing.