You Don't Scare Me

Fear is a powerful thing. It will motivate you to do a lot of things- to part with a lot of things. When everything's good, it's not too hard to be rational and think critically. When someone threatens you with the loss of something, it's hard to not be irrational and act emotionally. This happens everywhere from sports to entertainment to politics. You hear how something might be lost unless certain conditions are met, then everybody panics and meets those conditions.

There are too many examples. Lately there has been a lot of labor strife in sports, with one league after another venturing to the brink. There was that grocery store scare as well, and a number of television shows are said to be at risk of going off the air for lack of efficiencies in budgeting. In every case we get scared and start wringing our hands, praying that somehow we could do something to avert calamity. If only we could sit at the negotiating table or just produce the needed money!

Condition Of Fear

Where is one most vulnerable if not the bathroom? We are stripped down in every sense of the word, bereft of clothes and defenses. We step behind the door and lock it, trusting that the world now cannot trespass on us as we lay bare all that which billions of dollars and millions of man-hours are dedicated to concealing and making look better. Frankly, I for one find the mirror to be a little too judgmental. So it was in this bastion that fear was struck into my heart, shattering the illusion.

It was late afternoon, and time at long last for the shower that signals to the day that I am ready for whatever it is to throw at me in the waning hours of daylight. I tend to be on autopilot, getting the water going, undressing, stepping into the shower and only then discovering whether I have what I need in order to conduct a successful shower. Usually it's all there, and I guess I got complacent. On this day, it was not all there.

Freak Out

I always counsel people to remain quiet about what they believe they have done wrong, and usually this falls within the context of artistic performances of one kind or another. Of course, I don't mean if you know something is wrong to keep it to yourself instead of bringing it up to those who can help. I just mean that when you've done your best and it's all over, let them figure out you were lousy- don't tell them. It's not easy to stick to that.

What's weird is when that actually works. You believe that what just transpired was an utter calamity, and you want to shout out to the world, "I was lousy, I let everyone down and I'm sorry!" You don't though- you wait for your lump to come to you as they inevitably must. They don't ever come, though. You think that you just wrecked everything forever, but people are thanking you or praising you. You start to feel crazy, and you now want to ask, "Did you not just see what happened?" You wonder if what you think happened actually didn't, because if it did critics would be swarming all over and out for blood.

One Staircase, No Waiting

Humanity is uniquely subject among animals to fear. For animals, it seems that there's a much greater measure of rationality to the fears- a firmer backing behind them. The cobra fears death at the hands of the mongoose, for example, and is quite right to do so. He furthermore handles that fear in a more productive way than his human counterpart. Perhaps all this is because the power of analytical reasoning is beyond such a creature's ability even to understand as a concept, let alone to attempt. Our knowledge of it is in a sense our downfall, because we then get the erroneous idea that we can do it.

A longstanding fear of mine which has relatively little reason behind it is that of escalators. For whatever reason, I can't stand to go up very steep ones, because they're rather frightening to me. I do it anyway, because I at least have the fortitude to respond to that particular fear correctly, but I assure you that my knuckles are white from the death grip I put on the guide rail. I start off fairly ordinary, but the longer it goes on, the more formidable an escalator that suggests, and I start getting more and more anxious, approaching the point of losing it entirely just as my feet find purchase on the surface of the ground or floor that dastardly mechanism leads to.