TOW: Fear

One of my biggest fears is the fear of failure. I like being successful, and I normally only take calculated risks...which means I take risks that have a 75% chance of being successful. This week has been interesting for me because as I start to set up my summer and fall, I am facing a lot of decisions of where I want to live, who I want to be, what clothes I want to wear, etc. etc. And all of that can be really, really, scary. (Especially choosing what clothes I want to wear.) Granted, maybe not as scary as standing between Oprah and her Double Cheeseburger, but scary, nonetheless.

The funny thing about fear is that we are often afraid of things we know we have no reason to fear. I'm scared of spiders. I know that fear is irrational; in my country, I have a better chance of being eaten by a bear than killed by a spider bite. And yet, there it is, fear itself, staring me in the face, with its ugly eight legs, and its beady red eyes. I have the heebee-jeebees just thinking about it.

Just like a fear of spiders, often our fear of the future is irrational and strange. Suprisingly, we aren't afraid of potential failure, but possible successes. We all know we have been unsuccessful at times, and we know what that feels like...but being a superstar in lights, with everyone looking at you like you're The Next Big Thing? TNBT??? What's that like? I might be happy and stuff! Eeeek!

It's easy to be unsuccessful, people do it every day. Some people do it while playing Trivial Pursuit. Some people do it with New Year's Resolutions. Honestly, it's pretty easy to be unsuccessful without even trying. For some reason apathy and being unsuccessful go hand in hand. Weird.

It's scary thinking we can actually be successful at the things we want. We worry that we might like it less than the current state we're in. We're afraid to want things we want in life in case they're bad for us, right?

Descartes, the french philosopher, didn't say many things that impressed me, but did say one thing that has stuck with me whenever I am afraid. In his words, "the usual fault herein is not that we desire too much, but too little."

What Descartes is saying is that when we desire, we usually desire simple, animal things. We want a bag of chips, or a glass of water. If we desired what we actually wanted, if we could dream big and desire big, we wouldn't be more greedy, but less. And perhaps what is scary about making real decisions in our lives is that instead of getting less, we get more, and we wonder if we ever deserved it. We think about ourselves and we are afraid of the future not because the future self is a worse self, but because we can actually see our future selves are better than we currently are, and we're terrified of it. We scared of the person in the future who might be better than us and we don't know how to get there, and even worse, if we do know how to get there, we can be scared of the commitment necessary.

Or least I am on a regular basis. And I think the reason I find 'future Brennan' so scary is that he might end up being better than I ever imagined, and sometimes the most fearful things are the ones you can't imagine, good or bad.

That's pretty scary.