“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Fear is the mind-killer.” – Frank Herbert
The Fight With Fear
The fight against fear is, when you think about it, the most noble struggle that mankind faces. Thinking of it conjures images of beleaguered heroes facing incredible odds. Odysseus against Polyphemus. David versus Goliath. In a strange trick of mind, fear, a part of us, seems bigger than us. Add to this the fact that our relationship with fear is constantly in flux. Sometimes the fear dominates, sometimes it seems as if it’s gone for good. But it never really goes away. It lurks in the corners of our minds, always with one eye open, watching over us.
A quick online search reveals an obvious truth: almost everything we write about fear involves us trying to rid ourselves of it, and our inability to do so. Fear is our great enemy. It keeps us from our full potential. From a higher wage. From the one we could love. Overcoming fear has become something of a human pastime. How many cliche pictures of people skydiving must we be subjected to before we realize collectively that jumping out of a plane isn’t a relevant act of overcoming fear? It’s trivial. Yet it still has the power to capture a part of us. Knowing how fully stupid it is, we still exclaim to ourselves and to Facebook: “wow!” Their overcoming of fear, pointless though it may be, was not meaningless. Facing a fear, any fear, and acting against its advice is enough to engender respect even amongst the annoyed.
Courage, which may be called the willful disobedience of fear, has a special place in our hearts. We admire people who show that they can disagree meaningfully with their fear. Some are elevated to the highest positions of moral respect (if not material worth) in our society. Soldiers become heroes. Revolutionaries become saviors. Words like “gallant”, “brave”, and “fortitude” are all variations of courage, and find themselves increasingly pirated and placed into contexts in which they don’t properly belong. It is no accident that political pundits race to classify their side as the brave one.
Conversely, those in thrall of their fear receive the worst treatment in our society. Those who are cowards form the lowest rung of the moral ladder. Again we see misapplications of terms. How many killers have been called “cowards”? Why do we call people who find homosexuality repugnant “homophobic”? This isn’t just a critique of their capacity to manage fear. It’s a moral conviction. It’s pejorative to say of someone that they make their decisions based on fear, even if almost all of us do it. A coward is perhaps the worst thing that a man can be called (well, the absolute worst is unfunny, which I can say from experience). Why is this?
My Theory on Courage
For all the hate we apply to fear, there’s a good reason why it’s a part of us: it keeps us alive. Fear has incredible survival value – it is the one element that stretches across almost every known living being that can move itself. The command is simple: “this thing may hurt you. Move away from it.”
Those who champion the brave and decry cowards would do to remember that cowardice is an incredibly effective idea.
Of course, there were some anomalies that crept up as our society evolved. Some individuals who ignored their fear achieved great things. They brought down giant creatures that could be eaten. They killed the local predator. Or won a battle against the encroaching neighboring tribe (or more darkly, plundered the neighboring tribe at great personal risk).
In these cases it seemed that fear was too careful in its estimates. True, danger carried a big risk, but as we like to say at the Naval Academy: fortune favors the brave. Huge rewards could be reaped through challenging fear, even if most of the time these situations led to the death of the humans involved.
Fear is about avoiding risk. Courage is about taking risk. And the more risk you’re taking, the more courage you’ll need. But courage couldn’t have paid all the time. If so, it would have been selected for, and none of us would heed our fears. The sad truth is that the most courageous humans who have ever lived probably all died of their courage. They were those who “live fast and die young”.
Of course, we’re not stupid to want to overcome fear. Specifically, fear seems to have become wired to our social reasoning in an odd way that almost always produces bad results. It misfires, causing us to expect a result like being trampled by an elephant from a situation like asking a woman to dinner. Everyone who has ever had trouble with public speaking, initiating a conversation, stating your opinion, asking for something, disagreeing (or agreeing, for some politicians), or, important to the modern zeitgeist, saying no, has experienced the awful effects of misfiring fear.
This seems to be the most important reason for the idea of courage. If our fear is causing us to limit ourselves, to be alone, to feel unheard, to not have the things we need – if it causing us to do things that we don’t want to do – then it’s easy to see why we hate fear. It keeps us safe, but at the cost of, well it seems, everything else.
Even knowing this, fear is in most cases almost impossible to overcome. Those who do it seem born to do so, and this isn’t encouraging (no pun intended). The rest of us seem to obey our fear almost constantly. Incubus is not the only artist to lament how much we all “let the fear take the wheel and steer”. Our lives are bounded by fear. It’s like an electric fence that surrounds us. It is a pool of water we wade into, that grows deeper and deeper until we could drown in it. It is a rabid animal that barks at us and, if we get too close, bites. Fear is a force that feels overwhelming, relentless. Were it an army, its reserves would be endless. Anyone with PTSD is a living testament to the fact that in a battle between fear and the mind, fear ultimately has the power to inflict long-term harm. It is the anvil that breaks all hammers.
The power of fear causes us, quite naturally, to fear it. There are really two reasons why we condemn cowards. The first is to discourage fear in our society. Fear is, as we know, infectious. It moves from person to person, and overwhelms us. Keeping it out of our social circle is important. The second reason is that we condemn cowards to signal to those around us that we are not cowards. This is, of course, almost always a false statement, but we make it anyway.
What we rarely talk about is appreciating fear. Coming to terms with it, respecting it. To do this, you have to see the good that fear can do for you. Of course fear is something to distrust in the social sphere, but what about in other spheres?
What about in a place of mortal danger?
Free Diving
Free diving is simple in theory. Hold your breath and go underwater and stay there for a good period of time. Some people try to go as deep as they can. Others are content to simply hold their breath as long as possible. Still others dive not for the challenge of facing their fear down, but to push their physical limits, or for simpler reasons. To see coral reefs and sharks without having to purchase or rent SCUBA equipment isn’t a bad reason. And it’s also just cool to be able to say that you can hold your breath for five minutes.
For me free diving became about fear. I, like almost everybody on the planet, become deeply afraid when holding my breath underwater for a long period of time. This seems obvious, but most people don’t think it’s particularly brave to hold your breath – unless you’re saving someone’s life.
For all our talk of courage, and its importance, the moments in our life when we face our fears are very few and far between. Most of the time, as I mentioned earlier, they are depressingly pointless gestures, like going skydiving so you know you’ve “faced” that fear. As if there are moments of life you must prepare for that involve comically large plummets to the planet. This is not to mention that the fear of falling is different from the fear of asking for a raise because falling is a completely legitimate source of injury and death. It is rightfully feared.
But this isn’t the point I’m trying to make. The point is that when we normally do things that involve “facing our fears”, they take on a certain characteristic. I call this the “in and out” method of courage. You feel intense, acute fear which must be overcome in a single momentous decision. The moment you make that decision though, the moment you take the leap into the abyss, the fear dissolves. The act is fittingly comparable to a bungie jump. The fear can be thought of as the ground that you imagine smashing into. You fall towards it at an incredible rate, then are suddenly yanked back to safety. This is the normal way we deal with fear. A short burst of it, followed by the incredible relief of having it over with.
The fear involved in free diving is much, much different than this. When diving you approach the fear more slowly, and the escape from it is just as slow. Free diving is like wading into a pool of fear, and watching it slowly come up around your ankles, then your knees, your waist, your chest, slowly crawling over you until it’s up at your chin, and you decide that it’s time to turn back. If you panic, flail, you will only realize how far into the fear you really are. You may even get swept out into the pool of it, drown in it. When you’re in that state of fear in which your legs can’t touch the ground anymore, that’s what we feel as panic. Fear becomes all-encompassing, infinite, overpowering. That’s what we want to avoid.
So we have to manage the fear. It’s up to our chin, and yet we turn around consciously, maybe coughing a bit as a wave catches us unaware, but keeping our composure. Then we deliberately walk back toward the shallower surf. Slowly, we extricate ourselves, watching the fear drain away.
The first touches with fear don’t need to be the biggest. You don’t just fall to 40m and sit there for 3 minutes. Not that you couldn’t, but if you expected that the first time you dove you’d probably be disappointed by the fact that your fear would get the better of you. It would take over, overwhelm you, and send you to the surface in a panic. And when you got there you’d feel like a coward, and suddenly this would become something different. It would become about proving yourself. And that’s not how it should be.
Sometimes what we call courage is simply fears smashing into each other. We’re afraid of being called a pussy, so we approach the girl in the bar. We fear being a coward, and so we charge into battle. This is what I mean when I say “proving yourself”. This was not one of those situations. The instructors make it clear that you go down only as far as you want. There is no judgment or expectation. In fact, they tell you not to go too deep at first. Take it slow. And I internalized this. I wasn’t going down to prove myself or my courage. I was going down to feel the fear.
25 meters is not a deep place for an experienced free diver, but 75 feet below the water is fairly far down for me. It’s also far enough from the surface that things begin to change. For one, the temperature is different. You feel somewhere around 15-20m that you’re entering a different body of water, one that is more permanent. One that the tides sweep over, that the sun doesn’t warm, that feels older and more thoughtful. As you sit down there for 30 seconds or so, looking around at the vast nothingness, you are reminded of Nietzsche and his nonsense about the void staring back at you. And as you sit there you have a rare sensation, something that I’ve actually never felt. It’s not that the void stares at you, but something does.
It’s as if your fear itself has become a living thing, and not a beast that you smacked quickly and ran away from giggling. It’s as if you’re holding your hand out to a dog that you’re almost sure will mangle you. You tensely wait and watch it get closer and closer, and yet it doesn’t pounce on you.
You know you could die down here, could black out. Even if you wanted to get to the surface as quickly as you could, you have 75 feet of water above you. You need the breath for that entire journey up. The fear is there, and yet here you are, sitting silently in the cold depths of the sea, watching it creep toward you.
It starts to growl, but you continue to watch it. You look into its eyes, and notice how alive they are, the way they shimmer, the way each strand of its hair is separate and distinct. You see your fear more closely and in more detail than you’ve ever known, and as you watch it, as you reach your hand out, it continues to approach you and then suddenly, for the first time in your life, you touch it without panic.
You feel its fur, tough and bristly, uncomfortable, with the things caught up in it that you’ve carried your entire life. It meets your gaze steadily, but doesn’t bite, and you realize that this creature has been protecting you your entire life from all the things that it thinks will hurt you. The thing you hated was defending you all along.
This fear has been with you through all of your lessons and journeys. And yet you’ve never looked at it. You’ve barely considered it. You know to avoid it, at all costs, to avoid the things that bring it around. And yet here you are, embracing it closer and closer, stroking its back, checking its teeth and gums.
It’s time to go. 30 seconds are up.
You scratch the fear behind the ears and with a pull of the safety line you begin to rise to the surface. As you do the fear watches you calmly, watches you as you drift away from it, and you feel the calmness returning to you. A part of you wonders what the hell you were doing down there, but the rest of you knows that was something else. That was something special.
When you break the surface you feel the sunlight on your face, and the sweet air fills your lungs, and the fear is fully gone, and you realize that just as you’ve never looked closely at the fear that is inside you, you’ve also failed to appreciate the fact that you are alive. That you can breath. That so many things in your life are wonderful and deserve to be cherished and loved.
“How was your dive?” the safety diver asks. You can’t help but smile.
“Good. Really good.”