The other side of fear

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
— Mark Twain

Fear is a fundamental underlying factor that prevents us from taking action, particularly from doing new things. This has been recognized centuries ago in various religious teachings and also has been played out in stories and movies. Yoda’s teaching Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back” is a good example, and so is Neo’s skyscraper jump in “The Matrix“.

For me personally, the situations where I notice the effects of fear are not as dramattic as they might be for others. My everyday life is quite cushioned from external threats that shaped our (human’s) fear-based responses by evolution. I think this is  also the case for majority of people I know.

But fear is there nevertheless. It surfaces as hesitation or inability to “invent” new techniques when I practice kendo, reluctance to try new lighting setups, camera angles and processing techniques in photography. Most often, this resistance to taking action leads to procrastination. In fact, it is procrastination, as Steven Pressfield eloquently explained in “The War of Art“.

The good news, albeit a difficult one to internalize and to act upon, is that most often, the fear is absolutely unfounded. Jamie Foxx said in a recent interview that he asks his children: “What’s on the other side of fear?” The answer, of course, is “Nothing”. Fundamentally, there is nothing to fear. Naturally, this a very profound concept, if taken in its all-encompassing generality, but the everyday applications are indeed very simple and easy to realize, even for a child. What is the worst that could happen if you speak in a loud voice instead of whispering? If you laugh out loud, holding your stomach and rolling on the floor, instead of smiling shyly? Not much, really. The stakes of taking action and being ourselves, doing what we want, are not as high as we would like to think.

In fact, there is a risk associated with not taking  action (the lost opportunity risk), and because of our propensity to inaction, we are more likely to suffer from it than from the risks associated with action. During basketball photo shoot, for example, if I switch from my tried-and-true shutter speed of 1/800 sec, which freezes action every time, and try a slow 1/250 sec speed, the worst thing that could happen is that some (alright, a majority) of the shots would be  blurry. On the other hand, the slow shutter speed sometimes results in striking images where the hands and the feet of the athlete are blurred, conveying the sense of motion, while the face is sharp (which conveys the sense of focus and intensity). A few missed mediocre shots are certainly worth capturing a single extraordinary image, particularly if I already have lots of action shots in my portfolio. In this case, the stakes of stepping outside of comfort zone are definitely not high.

Because inaction, maintaining the status quo, is so comfortable, simply recognizing that there is nothing on the other side of fear, that the fear has no substance is not trivial and is in itself an excessive in present-state awareness.