What we have to fear?

1 minute

Over the last few days, I have been thinking about fear a lot — fear is a great motivator for both action and inaction. So much of what we do — or more likely do not do — comes from a fear that the result will be bad for us.

So where is this fear coming from?

Fear is seemingly always extrinsic. We have a fear of things outside of ourselves. No one fears themselves. We have a fear of the different, the unusual, the uncomfortable, the unknown, the dangerous, and the terrifying. And those are just our foreseeable fears. Some of us — as we lay in bed at night — come to a realisation that there are a whole set of fears that we have not even contemplated yet — the unforeseeable fears. So we unleash our imaginations to make the unforeseeable fears seeable. We drive ourselves into stasis — unable to move or make a sound lest we inadvertently call that fear into reality.

What have I been fearing, you ask … fearfully?

The recent round started the night before my flight to Krabi. A fear deep in me was stirring — an apprehension that my flight was not going to make it. I woke up the morning of my flight dreading having to get on the plane. I told Mel (with whom I was staying in Singapore) that I would not mind missing my flight. She looked at me puzzled. This was not the usual.

I don’t fear flying — I do it often enough to have no fear. When I do fly, I undertake a stoic exercise of contemplating the flight being my terminal flight. I make sure I say goodbye to everyone. But this does not evoke fear. Its a stoic contemplation of mortality — its reassuring and brings focus to what matters.

But this Krabi flight was different. This was a fear and not a contemplation. Why was this flight causing so much fear?

(Now, I am safely in Koh Lanta, and the flight obviously made it. More in the next post.)