The Fear Common to Us All

(But We're Too Damn Scared to Admit It)

“I’ll try to explain about the fear
again
since you think my trouble with the whales
and elephants is a question of size.”

— Jack Gilbert, from his poem, “I’ll Try to Explain About the Fear”

It was Aristotle who first recognized the preeminence of courage among all the virtues. “Courage is the mother of all virtues,” he said, “because without it, you cannot consistently perform the others.”

It’s true, of course. But there is hidden in that axiom another truth, tucked away in the folds of its words so we don’t even see it, or perhaps do not want to. But, here. I’ll pull back the veil with a simple question: 

What need would we have for courage unless we were afraid?

Aristotle assumes fear as the baseline reality of human existence, and this strikes us as so true, so ubiquitous to our shared experience, we hardly even notice when he does it.

We are all afraid. Every day. Nearly all the time.

I don’t mean we’re all quaking in our boots, having panic attacks on the hour, bearing up under the impossible crush of unmanageable anxiety (though, to be fair, a hell of a lot of us are suffering daily in precisely those ways and many others besides). Rather, when I say we’re all afraid all the time, I mean that fear as a category of concern is constantly in our thoughts. For example:

Fear of sleeping through your alarm in the morning. Fear of being late for work. Fear of being in a car accident. Fear of not making the deadline. Fear of upsetting your prickly boss. Fear of looking stupid in front of your coworkers. Fear of raising your children wrong. Fear of pedophiles and gunmen and sexual predators of all kinds. Fear of being mugged or robbed or raped or killed. Fear of not being able to pay the bills. Fear of disappointing your children or your partner. Fear of gaining weight. Fear of losing your beauty, or your strength. Fear of illness, or of injury. Fear of oppression from the government or from the greed of corporations. Fear of the enemy. Fear of not being enough, of not having what it takes, of not being beautiful enough or strong enough or smart enough or consistent enough or courageous enough or worthy enough. Fear of death.

You and I and everyone you’ve ever known or ever will — we fixate on fear all the time. Fear is our baseline state.

And yet, we are afraid to admit to each other that we are afraid!

How mad is that?! But this is perhaps our greatest fear of all. We’ll do nearly anything to hide our fear from other people. We’ll laugh and joke and make believe it’s all a gaff. We’ll puff out our chests in a show of pompastic pretense. We’ll put on a Zen master’s face and fake the Buddha. We are all so afraid to admit our fear that the best we can offer is a hollow, “Fine, and you?” as we pass each other by on our mad rush through the day. 

If only we could all just stop this shared madness for one quiet hour, strip the scales from our eyes and look around at all those people we are so damn afraid of, and see that they are just as afraid as we are, that they also live every day consumed by fear of so many things, that they haven’t a clue how to manage all this, or make sense of it, or be sure of anything, least of all themselves. 

They are scared, just like we are scared. And the great irony is that the fear we so diligently hide from one another, that keeps us divided in our own little self-defended pocket kingdoms, is actually one of the core qualities that binds us all together as one human family. 

We are all afraid. All the time. Every day. 

Once you see that, you cannot unsee it. 

Once you know that, it’s not so easy to hate anymore. Or keep your heart hidden away.

It’s time to break the cycle. Hiding our fear is killing us. Literally. And it’s killing our souls. Which is worse. 

Why not start today? Right here, in this post. 

Hello. My name is Michael.

And I am afraid. 

Honestly, sometimes, I’m terrified.

I have fear about a lot of things, but here’s one I deal with every day:

Regret. I’m afraid of regret. I’m afraid of getting to the end of my life and looking back and realizing I missed something vital. I failed to do “X,” and God only knows what X might be. But it’s big, and important, and I’m probably blowing it right at this moment, because I’m too dense to recognize X and go after it like I should. 

Yeah, I’m afraid of that X. It haunts me.

What about you? What’s the fear that haunts you every day?

Put it in the comments below. I don’t want to be alone in this. (I’m afraid of that too.)

We don’t have to let fear divide us. With just a little courage, we can use it to bind us together instead.

p.s. That Jack Gilbert poem I quote at the beginning, it’s a revelation. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing—two or three times at least if you can. It’s good medicine.