Gripped By Fear
Mother Nature paid me a visit the other day, in the form of a mountain lion. My dog was barking wildly, standing on a rise about 75 yards below my home in the mountains. A cougar had been spotted a few days earlier. Armed with my trusty wooden staff I headed down into the gulley. Suddenly, a muscular cat, easily weighing a hundred pounds or more, came trotting out through the gulley a stone’s throw from me, and disappeared quietly into the forest. Further up the gulley I found a pile of loose brush covering a partially eaten deer carcass. It was like the one I had seen the year before not far from my mailbox, lying in the ditch, gutted. I remembered the horrifying thought and sickening feeling in my stomach of ‘what if I found one of my young daughters lying in that ditch?’
Fear reaches down deep into our biology. Suddenly, I felt like men have felt throughout the ages, vulnerable, afraid, with a strong impulse to protect my family. Fear can be a good thing. It wakes us up from complacency and mobilizes us into action. Fear makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks and prepares us to deal with danger. But at the same time, it is a primitive response. Fear causes us to contract, crawl into our shell of self-preservation, and adopt a ‘me against them’ approach to the world. When we are afraid our breath is too tight to think creatively about complex issues. We are susceptible to manipulation, which is why politicians, as well as doctors, have been known to use fear to persuade people.
There are many levels of fear that range along a continuum from clicking on your child’s seat-belt, to completing a work deadline, to generalized anxiety disorder, and ultimately to full-out panic attacks. But in the long run fear is no way to live your life. It is not a good reason to stay in a job or a relationship that doesn’t work. Over the course of a lifetime, fear can become the tension of hypertension and the heart attack of the overly aggressive Type A individual. Or if turned inward, fear can grow into the malignancy of the Type C, cancer-prone individual. Eventually the truth of the fear will come out. The inner world and outer world reflect each other. As it has been said, “We experience the world not as it is, but as we are.”
There is only one antidote to fear and that is courage. By courage I do not mean the kind of naive bravado young men are prone to in times of war, nor hatred of the enemy, nor self-denial. True courage is born of compassion; understanding the full range of human nature and then with a vulnerable, open heart reaching out to its noblest aspects. Through courage we can remain open and wise in face of the danger.
With a mountain lion frequenting my neighborhood, these thoughts are more than idle speculation. And, with American women and men fighting in the oily, blood-soaked deserts of Iraq, as well as the fear of a terrorist attack at home, we as a people must look carefully into the fear in our hearts, into our own human nature, and decide how we will express it.
Paradoxically, fear only has power over us, if we are unwilling to feel it. The moment we breathe into it and allow the fear to wash through us, then the choice of great courage becomes possible…and these are times that call for great courage and wisdom from each of us.