Fear

Good morning. Fear is the biggest riskfactor in our world. It is the fear that makes conflict inevitable. If you fear something is going to happen, you'll start thinking something WILL actually happen and it both paralyses you and makes you ready to attack. Even when you fear the unlikeliest thing to happen, you'll find reasons it will anyway, if your fear overwhelms you.

I experience this my self every time I fly. I hate flying. The worst time is the walk from the airport gate to the seat on the plane. Or the bus ride they take you on where you pass the planes that just landed, the men who load the planes off and on and the airport buildings get further and further away. At this point my heard starts pounding at an unnormal speed and my feet loose touch with the ground and my head feels like air, producing a dizzy feeling. I don't know why I'm afraid. I'd consider that it might be the loss of control, or the unnaturalness of it all. I mean, what are we doing up there in the air anyway, we were given feet for a reason and NOT given wings for an even better reason. The thing is, I'm way too rational to be handling this fear in a good way. My rationality demands of me to find a rational reason for my fear or a rational reason not to fear it anymore. I read tons of pages on how an airplane can fly, check out http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/AERO/airflylvl3.htm and pages of psychological advice with calming statistics that basically says: "don't worry, one million, trillion people fly every year and you're a sucker if you think you're going to be in the one plane that crashes every fifth year". OK, fine I get it. So I decided it might not be the turbulence or the lack of a motor or a storm or the disappearance of air that’s going to make us crash. And, still, I was afraid, I was petrified. How to explain that? How to rationalize that I was sure to die just boarding the next plane? I started looking amongst the passengers and crew. I started looking for drunken pilots and incompetent cabinpersonell. I started looking for passengers with a look of willingness to die, and here is where I got screwed up. In my effort to ease my fear and understand it I activated all I'd ever heard about psychology and politics. Fear let what I had had on an analytical distance get under my skin. I'm a student of political systems and cultural behaviour, I've spent the last seven years breaking down barriers through initiating dialogues and understanding social patterns, and then I got afraid of flying, and I started doing the one thing I hate: I started profiling. Who amongst the passengers was most likely to take us crashing down. I loathed myself for it. All my morals fell, I do not judge people on the way they look, never, but my fear paired with my logic made a dangerous explosive and I started to see what great danger fear harbours. How inhuman it can make us, how far it can drive us from what we believe. I decided that I might fear flying again, but in an effort to save my own humanness I needed to except my fears illogic and focus on my own flaws instead of the ones I projected on to others. I'll let you know how it went. Next time I fly.