Fear

Fear is the great disabler.

Fear requires no basis in reality, or it may have a basis so long removed that it no longer has relevance to current affairs.

Fear can control your life, preventing you from trying new things.

All of these presume that the reaction to fear is to pull in, to hide, to retreat, to entrench, to shield oneself from imagined harm.

I am far too intimately familiar with these forms of fear reactions, they have controlled me for all of my life. The most overwhelming has been the fear of the negative reaction of those whom I know and respect, in situations where the fact that I know them should show the fear to be with no basis, for the fear presupposes their being negative, judgmental, and self-centered, all of which I knew to be false images, yet still the fear would hold me back.

There are times when it is right to fear, but where possible one should strive to work through the fear to the underlying reality, and then take considered action to deal with the rational basis for the fear, to be advised by your fear but to not be mindlessly driven by your fear. Devise ways of testing that which you fear so that you can find out if it is rational to fear, and if it is, then work to define the factual dimensions of rational fear so that it may guide you, not blind you.

It is rational to fear fire, but we have learned to harness fire, answering our fear by learning about that which we fear, and through that knowledge, reducing the threat posed by fire; never eradicating the threat, for it is real, but devising safeguards such that with a healthy fear we can use fire to our benefit. Without fire, flint was as far as we could progress in tool making; with fire, we could eventually progress to building computers.

And I read over this, and fear that it is too fragmented, that too many different forms of fear are dealt with without proper exposition or transitional writing, that maybe its not perfect.

It isn't perfect, but it may spark useful thinking anyway, so I'll post it, in despite of my fear.