I’ve been thinking about fear lately. Fear is something humans and animals share, but animals seem to react much more predictably when they feel fear. The dogs bark or cower or flinch. The cat puffs up her tail or hisses or runs. The rabbit quivers and his heart beats really fast. But we human animals, we aren’t so clear about expressing our fear. We hide our fear behind bravado or anger or helplessness. Only the very few, the enlightened ones, the truly brave, can say “I’m scared.” Children are very good at it. They haven’t learned that in our world, showing fear is dangerous. Our society sells fear, mostly through the media, newspapers, television, movies. But even on an individual level there is an accepted level of paranoia today that we unconsciously connect with. Fighting that fear has become normalized. And yet children say quite openly they are scared of the dark, that some movies or tv shows are too scary to watch, or they don’t want to be left home alone because they are afraid. Of what? My youngest says “robbers”. Where did she get that? Is that a realistic fear? Probably not. She may not literally mean “robbers”. She could have said “the bogeyman.” I believe that we have inherited fear through our collective consciousness that makes us alert to danger on a physiological level, but the question is, is the danger real or just a sensationalized message from our society that triggers our fear? When did staying home alone become dangerous? When did people become more dangerous than wild animals or the natural environment? We certainly seem to fear ourselves more than anything else, in the developed world anyway.
At what point do we say to our kids when their fears seem unreasonable to us, “grow up, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Meanwhile we are feeding them reasons daily to fear through our messages like, “don’t talk to strangers”. Today all strangers are suspect when young kids are around. That’s like saying you are guilty until proven innocent. What happened to us? My son recently went running with the dogs through the arboretum and stopped at the water to let them swim. There was an older gentleman feeding the ducks and they struck up a conversation. Now granted, my son is seventeen and not a young girl, but even in his telling of the story I had a flutter of fear that there might be some danger in his complete openness to a stranger. My son sees the world as an opportunity to connect with people. He is not afraid. He has rejected society’s constant fear mongering. Is that youth? Perhaps. I traveled around Australia and New Zealand for four months by myself when I was twenty and I can’t remember one incident when I was really afraid, at least of people. Are the young just not brainwashed by our culture of fear quite yet? I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that there is some kind of hiding we adults do, some cover up that we teach our kids by example. We dismiss their real fear (the dark), invest in paranoia (everybody is out to get us), while repressing our own real fear (vulnerability usually) behind other equally negative emotions like anger. No wonder kids are confused. They are like animals when they are young, alert to the moment. They have a better sense of what constitutes real fear than adults, even if it’s in their imaginations, because they sense, quite rightly, that there is darkness in all of us. It’s when we try to run from it that it chases us.
My son is trying to educate me now, disappointed and saddened by what he sees as so much missed opportunity out of fear. It’s true that we attract openness by being open. As is the reverse. I am trying to wear his colored glasses a little bit every day. I hope I can learn how to live with my many fears (of failure, of loss, of being alone, of sickness, of dying young etc.) while still enjoying the experiences of life as they present themselves to me. And I hope I can learn in time to re-educate my children if they begin to falter under the weight of society’s fear in their adulthood. Their capacity to absorb life fully may depend on it.
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