fear Archives - Jason Ross

Sometimes I learn more from my clients than they learn from me. This week a client was asking herself “What do we define as our greatest luxury?” Her answer to her own question was “freedom”. We spoke about the freedom of movement, to travel and visit the people we love. We also talked about the freedom to go inward. In the face of so many people having to do what it takes to simply stay alive, having the space and time to consider my own thoughts and feelings is surely an odd luxury?

South Africa has followed suit with the Oriental trend of a draconian approach to Covid19. As of tomorrow, we are essentially still in lockdown and our efforts to combat the effects of Covid19 are only just beginning. The virus is one thing, the consequences of the virus are a whole new struggle.

We were delivering food to the local community. I asked the man in the picture if he had been receiving food since lockdown:

He shook his head in resignation, nothing.

Not even hot meals?

Nothing.

But I have heard there are people giving out hot meals on some days.

I am too afraid to leave my room, he replied, his head still shaking with resign.

Mark Epstein wrote that “Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.” The problem is that fear robs us of creative action. Fear hinders us from becoming the things we could become. Fear literally starves us of our freedoms.

This man’s resignation stuck with me. As we drove off I thought of Dostoevsky – “To live without hope is to cease to live.” We sometimes die before death arrives. I hoped that taking food back to his community might give him a sense that things are possible. We cannot live without hope and we cannot afford to become paralysed by fear. Freedom is not just about exercising between 6am-9am tomorrow. Freedom is a willingness to reinvent ourselves in the face of crisis, to continue to imagine possibilities for our lives, beyond the narrow confines of our collective fearfulness.

This is what the fear of Corona has done to our morning coffee; cluttered it with vitamin C and other potentially placebo prophylactics. The difference between fear and anxiety is that fear is for something that tangibly exists in the world. Fear is designed to help us avoid the object of our fear. Fear is rooted in something real and is designed for our own survival through encouraging us to do something about it, even if this “something” is simple avoidance. Anxiety, on the other hand, is for something less tangible. Anxiety is fear dislodged from any specific object, “free floating” (as psychology puts it) in the background of our minds. It is not so easy to do “something” about anxiety. We are born into the world with an inkling of it. As it increasingly frees itself from its original moorings, it slips away from our efforts to contain it.

It is a good time to try and recognise the difference between fear and anxiety. It’s a good idea to fear #covid19 and behave accordingly. The anxiety that it feeds, however, is not going to be all that helpful. Anxiety will leave us in denial, restlessness, panic or disorganisation. The most we can do with anxiety is to just let it be. Treat it with somewhat indifference. Or bring it back to its original object – fear of death, loss and loneliness. Or, the very incomprehensibility of the fact that we exist at all and why.

This is especially important for us at this stage of our efforts here in South Africa. We are only at the onset of our battle with the corona virus. For those of us who are privileged enough to have a fridge full of food and a roof over our heads; lockdown is a temporary breather before the real change comes and our real efforts begin. So, I have been encouraging my clients to pace themselves. To save their energy for what is to come. Anxiety is wasteful of our resources. “Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boomanxiety

Tag: fear

Still(a)Life#35: Freedom is the Luxury to Reinvent

Still(a)Life #19: Effort to Contain Anxiety

Instagram