Getting a Grip on Gripping Fear

A few nights ago, I awoke in the middle of the night terrified by a nightmare – paralysed and barely brave enough to breathe.

Organic Window Bars

I’ve been exploring my thoughts about fear in general and my fears in particular through journaling, Rune and Card readings. That warning I had back in 2009 amplified the intensity and frequency of fear in my life.

However, I am always aware even during times of acute fear that it is a manifestation of thought. Fear is thought; which to me means that I can choose to take control of my fear. That’s proving easier said than done, but that fact does not negate the reality of the statement.

We have all heard of the Fight or Flight response and we all know of the paralysis engendered by intense fear. What I started to wonder about recently is what about fear that just sits on your shoulder as an ever present, mostly under the radar stress? You know, the kind that causes heart attacks.

Psychologists and sociologist today agree that many people live under conditions of heightened stress. Stress has become a by-product of our lifestyles and it is insidious.

How do you fight a constant, ephemeral companion? How do you run away from it when it is part of your landscape? How can a person be free of fear?

Well… you can’t. In actual fact, fear is a primal emotion – so is hope. Both are also well-used emotions by those that would persuade or control us. Put simply, dictators use fear and leaders use hope to get the masses to respond. From there, emotion manipulators abound.

So, we all have to learn to live with fear and it’s personal. The only person that can help you live fearlessly is yourself. Dang, I hate it when I get to one of these conclusions. Just once I’d like to be able to hand of the job of making me happy and well adjusted to someone else.

Anyway having reached this thought, the question becomes, “How does one live WITH fear instead of IN fear?” Also, “Is it possible to turn fear into strength?”

I just finished reading Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

Perhaps, my sister is right. I should not read this type of book. I have read many books of this type over the years for my work. These are non-fiction, factual books about the type and scale of damage humans have wreaked on our planetary ecosystems. This one and Dirt by David Montgomery drove home to me (right around the time I had that nightmare) that Earth will never be restored; we’ve taken it too far from its original state already.

That is not to say that we can’t return to living on a healthy planet, but not the one we started with or even had 50 years ago. These two books also show me that part of our problem is that we live too briefly to truly understand the level of change that’s taken place in our ecosystems.

So, this is the fear that sits on my shoulder and I cannot unlearn what I know. What I need to know now is, “What is the appropriate Fight for this kind of fear?” I think I can figure out the Flight answer to this question all by myself.

In my journaling, I came to the thought that my fears can become my strength if I understand where they come from and what they mean to me.

When I woke the other night, the words that came to me were pain, violence and solitude. According to Jared Diamond these are inevitable conditions during a societal collapse and our society is now global.

We are already seeing the collapse all around us. Our children will live through that collapse unless everyone everywhere becomes an environmentalist. That will mean different things for different people in different places of course, but it is a requirement if we want our grandchildren to have anything remotely like our lifestyles.

As soon as I figure out how exactly, I’m going back into the fight because there is nowhere to fly from this one.