The Season of Fear

It is the week of Halloween – although the season has been in full gear for about a month.  When words like terror and horror and fright are thrown about with regularity, as are images of decaying corpses and sharp fanged creatures and skeletal figures.

I’ve never been much of a horror fan.  That isn’t to condemn it – it just never worked for me.  There was a point when it scared me in a way I didn’t need scaring (I have an imagination that does that well enough) and then when it bored me.  Because sometimes the gore and guts are just too much that it becomes tedious. 

I make note of this not as a complaint.  More that I’ve been reflecting on fear quite a bit lately.  

On the personal level -  I have gotten away from writing and started listening to The War of Art again to get my mind back in the game for November 1^st.  If you’re not familiar with Steven Pressfield’s book, he talks a lot about resistance.  The excuses we come up with not to do a thing (write).  To oversimplify, a lot of it is about fear.  As I contemplate his philosophies, I see the fear dominating other parts of my life.  My procrastination (which he says is a form of resistance) to get moving on a big change in my life.  Conversations I avoid having.  Truths I let stay buried.

I think of all these things I fear and wonder how I function every day.  I do. Because ultimately I know fear is … well I think Pressfield sums it up appropriately -  “Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

So here I am writing.

That is a fear I can control.  A fear I can dismantle and understand.  But there is so much fear in the larger world right now that, frankly, I find more terrifying than any ghoul or monster that will appear in latex or face paint tomorrow night.

Like so many people I see the headlines every day and feel dread, disbelief, and horror.  Sometimes it is the stupidity of words shared on impulse.  But then there are the senseless tragedies of lives lost.  Twice last week, a real life monster in human form went to a public place and decided to shoot other human beings because he saw a monstrosity in their skin color or religion.  An act of hate.  But really, doesn’t the hate come from fear?  Fear that is fertilized by those stupid words shared on impulse.  But also by the escalation of everyone’s fear and defensiveness.

And how can we not fear now?  Not wonder if this public place where we go could be another location of a tragedy?  I can’t live with that thought.  I don’t want to.  But to not crumble and curl up into a ball requires some rigidity and strength.  The easiest source of that is anger.  Rage at the people who allowed this to happen.  Who gave that stupid impulsive voice a platform to sow his hate.  Who didn’t show up in 2016 to stop it.  Who turn a blind eye to their culpability.  Who insist on their goodness by posting memes about kindness and complimenting a haircut and quotes from Buddha.  But still won’t show up next Tuesday to vote against or at all. 

So maybe I don’t need those people in my life any more.  I can’t talk to them.  They don’t want to listen or hear.  I’m at the point where I don’t want to hear their excuses or how they rationalize the fear of brown people crossing the border to sell drugs or the government unleashing taxes on us or how #metoo is victimizing so many innocent men. 

But anger is the worst consequence of fear.  It is how we start to turn into the monstrosity we want to condemn.

Halloween comes to us from Samhain, a holy day of the ancient Celts.  It is believed that on this day, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest.  The fear was that evil spirits would slip through the veil, so people dressed up like monsters to scare them away.    I guess this is something we’ve been doing for a long time.  When we fear, we feel powerless.  We imitate the power of the thing we fear to undo it.  Maybe that works.  But isn’t it a dangerous line?  Because at what point does that power infect us so we become the monster too?

I don’t want to give in to that fear.  I don’t want to be a monster.  Anger turns the world ugly and squeezes out the color of the simplest opportunities for joy.  It blinds us to the opportunity to connect with and learn from the many diverse humans on this brief sojourn of life.  And it is brief – why do we let fear escalate so that people want to make lives even briefer?

The other part of Samhain – and the concept that is worth honoring on Halloween – is that the veil also allows the spirits of our ancestors to pass through and visit.  A way to honor the past and reflect on the lessons those lives have left us.

I have given a lot of thought to my grandparents and how they lived through a World War.  A war to fight fear that became fascism.  What fear was like to that generation.  Waking up not knowing if someone had died across the ocean.  How that fear made it okay to otherize Germans and Japanese.  How the war both humbled and inflated a nation.

But they also hated.  My grandfather was, like many of his generation, not open minded about Jews and people of color.  He did love fiercely and raised a family of another generation that could see beyond those prejudices as well as fight against them.

Thinking of my ancestors – my grandparents – I am reminded, perhaps of what is sacred about Samhain.  The solemnity of death and dying.  How the loss and absence of a loved one is a sadness that becomes part of you.  It is something all humans share.  Something that we all fear – both of others in our life and our own lives.  And that, when you experience it, is when you realize we all feel something in common.  No matter our generation or ethnicity or country or politics.  We all grieve.  We all fear grief.  We all suffer.  And that is where I find empathy.

Another one of Pressfield’s philosophies is that the more we fear something, the more we are meant to do it.  In art, that is easy to contemplate.  In acting the roles that have terrified me have often been the most rewarding (well, before my brain got too full to learn lines quickly).  In writing, that is a no brainer.  I do struggle, though, to figure out how this applies to the world at large.  Except… perhaps… that this is an opportunity for our nation.  Our world.  If we don’t use the fear as an excuse to bury our heads in the sand and embrace the challenge to rise up and speak up.  More people are getting involved.  More women and people of color and LGBT are running for office.  The world is changing and if we don’t give fear the power, just think what it could be. 

And just thinking about that, I don’t fear.  I hope.