Psychology Of Fear

Day 280: We all have our small fears: spiders, stock market crashes, the monster under the bed, dropping our cell phone down an open manhole, but what does it mean to be truly afraid? "Afraid," as in "terrified?" How many of us have been held at gunpoint, seen a comrade in arms blown to bits beside us, fallen from a great height? How many of us can actually claim that we know what that type of fear feels like? And how can we say that we know how we'd react in such a situation? You've heard the expressions, "paralyzed with fear" and "running into the face of danger." They seem contradictory, and in fact they are, and yet both are perfectly normal reactions to terror. Aside from being instinctive and almost uncontrollable reactions, in both cases, the result is the same: we do the wrong thing. We make a choice (conscious or not) which, if we'd had a little more time to think about it, might have shown itself to be a foolish one.

Right now, people are scared out of their wits, myself included. We see the rising numbers in the case counts and death tolls in our country, our states, our counties, and if they don't set us trembling in fear, then we are either ignorant or insane. Many people are reacting as if they are invincible, i.e., flaunting danger by going maskless or gathering in groups. Others are gambling, believing the odds to be in their favour, pulling the handle on the slot machine over and over and over, sure the winning combination will come up until finally they realize they're out of money. Fear inspires foolish behaviour. Fear drives us to make bad choices, not only as individuals but as a mass. Reopen schools! Hold that county fair! Let's go to the park! Let's have a picnic! We'll be fine if we wear masks and stay six feet apart. No, we won't, and it's time we face up to facts.

Get a grip on your fear. Don't let it make you do something stupid. In the words of Frank Herbert as spoken by Paul Muad'Dib in 'Dune,' "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." And know that I am repeating these words not because you need to hear them, but because I desperately need them to be true.

Basest Fears

Day 6: Sit back down! Now, tell me why you jumped out of your hide at the sight of a perfectly innocent Cross Orbweaver (Araneus diadematus). "I don't like spiders!" Yeah, I gathered that. I have to admit I'm not keen on the subject myself (few people are), but what is it about them which causes one of our basest fears to surface? Is it that they have eight legs? So does an octopus, and I imagine you don't regard octopi with the same measure of loathing. Is it that they seem to defy gravity and can suspend themselves in mid-air? Hummingbirds manage that, although admittedly it takes a lot of wing flapping. If you have lived or live in an area where poisonous spiders occur, you would be justified in according them all due respect when you encounter them, but why do we, collectively and almost universally, dislike spiders so much?

Quite honestly, I don't have the answer. My fear of spiders was instilled in me at an early age by my mother. She was terrified of them, but then, we had black widows to worry about. My mother's reaction to finding a black widow in our back yard made quite an impression on me at age three or four, so I spent many years panicking whenever even a small spider entered my personal space. As a naturalist, I later learned to value them as part of the natural order, but it took quite a bit longer before I could force myself to take the steps necessary to remove a live one from my house.

Ms. Orbweaver slung her rigging between the outdoor housing of my heat pump and a hosta I was planning to divide after I'd pulled the frost-nipped tomatoe vines today. I almost got my head in her web, but caught her presence in the tail of my eye in time to prevent an encounter which would probably have sent me screaming into the next county. It would have been a grave injustice to her, considering the service she renders in my garden. The hosta can be divided later. She's outside, I'm inside, and we'll leave it at that for now.