Living With and Without Fear

Fear is an sneaky son-of-a-bitch.

It's amazing what we mistake for fear. The common strains of anxiety, perplexity, frustration. We can get completely wrapped up in an emotion and not even recognize its true origin. How many times have you found yourself wrapped in a cycle of distressing thoughts and been unable to pinpoint its impetus? A lot. I'd guess.

A few days ago, I was in a fit of righteous indignation over the seemingly trivial matter of vacation days. Now, what you're reading is just words on a page, but try to make this concept physically/emotionally tangible for a moment: getting stressed over the amount of time that is allocated to relieve stress. When you spell it out on paper (or its cyber equivalent), the notion seems absurd. What could possibly be more counter-productive than worrying about vacation days? Hating your spouses' Valentine's Day present?

When you have the luxury of resenting gifts, you are living without fear.

That sentence isn't meant to be condescending, though there is an unfortunately unavoidable aftertaste of "I've-seen-some-shit, son" (unavoidable, at least, to the extremely amateur wordsmith). If I could say it better, I would. But I can't. With that in mind, just trust that dental examinations of equines presented gratis are generally conducted by those who have fuck-all else to occupy their time. Lifelong habit dies hard - if you don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed, it's easy to manufacture one.

It's easy to forget that teaching overseas (and I speak of Korea in particular) is an incredible gift. Frustration is an easily renewable resource when you can barely communicate with your co-teachers or order a decent meal in a restaurant. There are very few of that saintly type who can keep their cool while trying to teach prepositional phrases to a group of bored teenagers who would rather whittle pencils into shivs than listen to another lifeless track of the Workbook CD. There have been very few stabbings in my classes, but I keep waiting...

A person can only worry about these things if they have no greater fears to occupy their minds.

When I came to Korea in August 2010, I was obsessively concerned about passing the medical exam. There wasn't much of a logical reason for this; my mind simply needed something to worry about. Fear is a stimulant, and if you use it for a longer enough time you inevitably get hooked.

After I passed the exam (on my second try, after initially failing the blood pressure test), I fell into a mind-numbingly comfortable routine. In the years before I came to Korea, fear had been my daily companion. I quit drinking coffee because each morning I would wake up with such severe anxiety that feeding those jitters with caffeine seemed certifiably insane. Yet I discarded this seemingly integral part of my personality within weeks. By the time November rolled around, it was easy to forget that my therapist had ever suggested a regimen of anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication. There was nothing substantial to fear, because the concerns of an ESL teacher are so remarkably insignificant in the chaotic and unsympathetic scheme of human existence. The students have low test scores? A pile of poorly-written diaries need to be graded? Some flash cards need to be laminated? Fuck, please...give that list of worries to a double-amputee victim of the Khmer Rouge and see if he bats an eyelash. Shit is trivial.

But habits are hard to kick, and I had some ups and downs. Sometimes I'd fantasize about the lush pastures awaiting in other academies and beyond - public high schools and universities being the most tantalizing day-dream destinations. Never mind that I was earning decent money at a fairly rewarding job with pleasant co-workers and a supervisor with surprisingly humane employee treatment policies.

A few days ago I got an email that threw this lovely yet unappreciated situation into jeopardy. And suddenly I was living with fear.

When you live with fear, each minute brings sixty opportunities to slip into a tar-pit of self pity. The untrained human mind is notoriously adverse to prolonged concentration and so when you take the entire waking day (let's say 16 hours for convenience's sake) into consideration you are presented with 48,000 potential descents into severe, instantaneous depression. Like all pits, the bottoms of these are sticky and thus it's easy to remain stuck for extended periods.

Living with fear means constant exposure to the stench of undesired death. Death being defined as the ending of something - life in the general sense, life in the sense of "a style of existence that is preferable and profitable", or life in the sense of something else.

Buddhism teaches that living with fear, in this sense, is a blindingly obvious cause of suffering. It's quite hard to be content and equanimous when you are struggling against the imminent demise of an integral part of your being. The struggle itself means you are not content. I credit the Buddhist teachings with my mental and physical survival to this point in time, but I must admit that I'm finding it quite hard to put the teachings into practice lately. The fear of utter loss is such a powerful force that it seems pointless to reckon with it. Oblivion is coming, and we must go to it - willingly, or kicking and screaming with all our strength and rage and helplessness and pent-up fury. I guess we're on the way whether we like it or not so we might as well have a smooth ride out, yet its hard keep such an easygoing mindset moment-by-moment.

Life with fear is so alien to life without fear. When you live with fear, it's hard to remember the fear-less version of you that existed before. And vice versa. Life with fear puts all of our mundane daily worries into perspective, but is this really a good thing? For most of us, such perspective comes only in times of utter despair. If only we could have this perspective without the fear that inspires it. I think this is the gift of the truly spiritual beings/persons; they can see the sufferings of the world in a proper scale without the aid of fear - they understand how to appreciate the struggles of the people they meet without inflating or minimizing their importance. And so they can respond accordingly from a secure base of wisdom, calmness, and empathy.

I hope to draw some inspiration and strength from their examples. Because for the untrained mind, living with fear can be an almost unbearably hellish experience. Wish me luck.