“First I was afraid. I was petrified…”
- Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive
I was once asked by a friend: how can I teach my children to live without fear? This sparked a wonderful conversation wherein we explored the nature of fear and eventually concluded that, when boiled down, it came in two distinct varieties. The first is the kind of fear that tells us to run, immediately, when being pursued by e.g. a bear, lion, or other predator or dangerous situation. The second kind is the fear that keeps us up at night, fixating on whether we’ll ever get the perfect job, find love, or live up to expectations (often our own, masked as those of others), at or by some arbitrary point in our lives.
The second variety of fear was the one she wanted to minimize in the lexicon of her offspring. As we dug deeper into the subject, we realized that to eliminate even that kind of fear was, in some ways, to miss the point of what it meant to be alive. Even that kind of fear was part of the tapestry of natural human experiences sometimes referred to as the emotion mind. The emotion mind can be instrumental in letting us know when a situation isn’t working for us, when a change is needed in our lives. Perhaps not so drastic as to run away from a chasing panther, still, these emotions are often the inkling that a solution is what we require.
But, we thought to ourselves, isn’t fear the thing that holds you back, that stops you from taking action? And while, yes, this is sometimes the case, fear’s argument can work in both directions, by paralyzing one into non-engagement, which can be disastrous, but also by pushing one into impulsive action, which can be equally destructive. The key seems to be to temper the expressive flare (or flair? Woo!) of the emotional mind with logic and reason, which are the specialties of the rational mind.
As our conversation waned, my friend and I contemplated the fate of our children (mine theoretical, hers very much real), and what it might take to survive a world where fear seemed endemic to existence. We then looked to our own experience. We live in a world of fear, presently. The world moves inexorably into a state of environmental non-sustainability. Idiots with nuclear capability run the world’s cadre of nation states. Childrens’ identities are being mined in the greatest ongoing wealth transfer event since Columbus set sail. Saying nothing for our children, one could argue it’s terrifying now.
Yet we persist. Let’s for once not be humble. Our lives are a shining example of what happens when resilience meets wisdom. Wisdom, or wise mind, to use dialectic language, is merely the sum of the emotional and rational minds, what happens when we balance our emotions, including fear, with objectivity and reason. Resilience occurs when our efforts surpass our resources and we exceed the expectations set forth for us by our circumstances. That is what it means to live without fear. It’s not that we will never be afraid. It’s not that we banish our emotions from our metaphysical sphere. It’s that we turn each day into an exercise of wisdom and resilience, we turn each day into a shining example of what it means to be alive, no matter what the circumstances, no matter the restrictions placed on us. That’s what it means to live without fear. We have somewhere between three and five years until our fortunes change. Go and make the most of it.
Travel safe and talk soon.
-AF
Quote source: I Will Survive (Peren, Fekaris), Gloria Gaynor
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