(Inspired by encounters with Maria Popova's fine blog, Brain Pickings [www.brainpickings.org] a while ago, and presented as an introduction to a forum on the subject with friends in my community, The Redwoods, in Mill Valley, California.)
The Importance of Being Scared – Forum, 15 May 2016
I chose the word “scared” because in the living and dying that we do every day being scared or frightened is on both sides of the ledger, light as well as dark, useful as well as painful, a part of our growth even when it’s something we’d rather forget, from which we seek relief, and for which we’re grateful when it’s behind us.
I’d like to invite each of you to recall at least one time you’ve been scared, in childhood or adulthood. Make a mental note of what comes to mind.
Here are two examples of my own. First, when I was small, I was scared of the dark; hardly unusual, but so vivid I can easily bring it visually to mind. Before going to bed, I remember looking in the closet and under my bed for whatever villain might be lurking there. I went to sleep on my stomach because I felt less vulnerable that way. Sometimes I called to my older brother, whose bedroom was next to mine, to be sure he was close to me. Even with those precautions, I imagined a bad guy climbing a ladder to come into my window and wreak disaster.
Second, again a fear from childhood, echoing forward. I loved my father deeply, but when he returned from battle in World War II, something in him had changed; something latent had become manifest; hard – virtually impossible at that age – for me to reconcile with the father I adored, depended on as guide for becoming a grown-up man, whose very name I bore. We would now call it PTSD, but in those years good treatment was hard to come by, and what did exist was often resisted. My father was among the resisters. I still loved him, but he frightened me; and I had no idea how to cope with that fear, even how to admit it to myself. So it became part of my underground, and my challenge to transform and redeem.
These are more than memories; they continued to glow in my darkness, and slowly to find their way into my light of understanding, perspective, forgiveness and peace.
My hypothesis is that being scared, however conscious or unconscious, is an important part of human development, and never entirely leaves us, though its foci and intensity will evolve, come and go, through the course of our lives. Here’s a familiar mini-menu from the Haunted Café down Camino Alto:
Eight sorts of experiences we may be scared of:
- Desertion or abandonment, losing those or that which we love or depend upon, including our own bodies and minds
- Entrapment (polio: family history, iron lung)
- Disorientation, getting lost, loneliness
Being scared is part of our biology, part of the evolution of our adaptation to life, and (having just ticked off a fearful menu) being scared ironically holds gems of promise, if we have the imagination, skill and courage to unlock and explore our Pandora’s box full of dark jewels.
Efforts to protect ourselves from fear can too easily have the paradoxical effect of confirming it, driving it underground where it’s less accessible to our wishes for relief, more accessible to tricks than to treats.
So what helps? Again, some examples:
A practice of mindfulness, contemplative inquiry, expression and exploration of our fears in safe, trustful circumstances, can be powerful ways of retraining our minds and brains to better bear, even enjoy the scary stuff inside. Something as simple and always-at-hand as attention to our breathing can work wonders. We may be hard-wired to avoid danger, but with practice, we can learn to befriend our fears, to dispose of baggage we’ve been carrying around long after the need for it has died or dissipated.
Things commonly viewed as antitheses or polar opposites are often deeply intertwined. The poet Rilke, when contemplating how befriending our mortality can help us feel more alive, wrote “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Pleasure and pain, even good and evil, are often not as antithetical as we may imagine. After all, terrific and terrible spring from the same source, and in the words of a friend, “that which grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the tumult.”
The importance of being scared. Remember the fairy tales gathered by the brothers Grimm and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen? Not the sticky sweetened versions of the Disney studios, but the tales themselves, full of that frightful reality, of things, as we say, that go bump in the night. Neil Gaiman, a remarkable Anglo-American artist and author, wrote that “if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection [against] them, no knowledge or understanding of dark things when they show up.”
One fine summary of this issue is that of the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate, Wislawa Szymborska. She wrote:
Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Andersen scared children, but I’m certain that none of them held it against him, not even after they grew up. His marvelous tales abound in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets. Not everyone in this brotherhood is harmless and well-disposed. The character who turns up most often is death [here again is Rilke], an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved. Andersen took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures [often with unhappy endings], are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague.
Neil Gaiman, who I mentioned a moment ago, hosted a semi-secret late-night event on Halloween ten years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia, at which he read a ghost story and a brilliant short essay he titled “Ghosts in the Machine,” contemplating the psychology of why scary stories speak to us so powerfully. Here is part of what he said on that occasion in 2006:
[Halloween is] a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there’s mist in the crisp night air and it’s time to tell ghost stories.
When I was growing up in England, Halloween was no time for celebration. It was the night when, we were assured, the dead walked, when all the things of night were loosed, and, sensibly, believing this, we children stayed at home, closed our windows, barred our doors, listened to the twigs rake and patter at the window-glass, shivered, and were content.
Now I write fictions, and sometimes those stories stray into the shadows, and then I find I have to explain myself to my loved ones and my friends.
Why do you write ghost stories [they ask]? Is there any place for ghost stories in the 21st century?
There’s plenty of room. Technology does nothing to dispel the shadows at the edge of things. The ghost-story world still hovers at the limits of vision, making things stranger, darker, more magical, just as it always has ....
There’s a blog I don’t think anyone else reads. I ran across it searching for something else, and something about it, the tone of voice perhaps, so flat and bleak and hopeless, caught my attention. I bookmarked it.
If the girl who kept it knew that anyone was reading it, anybody cared, perhaps she would not have taken her own life. She even wrote about what she was going to do, the pills, the Nembutal and Seconal and the rest, that she had stolen a few at a time over the months from her stepfather’s bathroom, the plastic bag, the loneliness, and wrote about it in a flat, pragmatic way, explaining that while she knew that suicide attempts were cries for help, this really wasn’t, she just didn’t want to live any longer.
She counted down to the big day, and I kept reading, uncertain what to do, if anything. There was not enough identifying information on the Web page even to tell me which continent she lived on. No e-mail address. No way to leave comments. The last message said simply, “Tonight.”
I wondered whom I should tell, if anyone, and then I shrugged, and, best as I could, I swallowed the feeling that I had let the world down.
And then she started to post again. She says she’s cold and she’s lonely.
I think she knows I’m still reading ....
And then, [Gaiman wrote; don’t expect him – or anyone – always to make conventional good sense], there was the one who said, in her cellphone’s voicemail message, sounding amused as she said it, that she was afraid she had been murdered, but to leave a message and she would get back to us.
It wasn’t until we read the news, several days later, that we learned that she had indeed been murdered, apparently randomly and quite horribly.
But then she did get back to each of the people who had left her a message. By phone, at first, leaving cellphone messages that sounded like someone whispering in a gale, muffled wet sounds that never quite resolved into words.
Eventually, of course, she will return our calls in person.
And still they ask, why tell ghost stories? Why take such pleasure in tales that have no purpose but…to scare?
I don’t know. Not really. It goes way back. We have ghost stories from ancient Egypt, after all, ghost stories in the Bible, classical ghost stories from Rome (along with werewolves, cases of demonic possession and, of course, over and over, witches). We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive.
Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses. You ride the ghost train into the darkness, knowing that eventually the doors will open and you will step out into the daylight once again. It’s always reassuring to know that you’re still here, still safe….
In order for stories to work — for kids and for adults — they should scare. [After all,] there’s no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn’t scary.
Halloween, All Hallows Eve, October 31st, began as a Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest season. For those ancient Celts it was their New Year’s Eve, the end of the light world and beginning of the dark, a night when the barrier between the living and the dead is permeable, when the living may listen and speak with those who have gone before,
a night of evil and terror when all hell broke loose. Goblins and ghosts were abroad that night, while witches celebrated their black rites as the spirits and souls of the dead roamed the earth. To frighten the evil spirits and to bolster their own sagging spirits, they created a din with bells, horns, pots and pans, and built fires to frighten the witches or perhaps burn them if they might get caught.
Our openness to being scared, our willingness (this is critical) not to anaesthetize or narcotize what we fear, are important to the fullness of our lives. For the fact is, however counter-intuitive it may seem, they can nourish our ability to be free, to witness truly, to understand ourselves and others, to practice kindness and generosity, to love, forgive and experience compassion wholeheartedly, to cooperate and create rather than to antagonize and destroy.
One of the writers whose companionship I treasure, again and again, is Flannery O’Connor, whose novels and stories often, even on rereading, evoke fear, of what she herself described as the grotesque and freakish. She once wrote,
I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to, and not what they can theorize about. My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea – she put her finger inside the cup….
In speaking of fiction she knew most intimately, especially Southern fiction, she went on to say,
“In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life… Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected… Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature… We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself… The problem for such a novelist will be to know how far he can distort without destroying, and in order not to destroy, he will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to big work.
If you are unfamiliar with O’Connor’s writing, if you would like to read the kind of fiction about which she speaks, writing that expands reality to include the scary and the grotesque without ignoring the commonplace and the wonderful, you might start with her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Its main protagonist, an escaped convict in Georgia, calls himself “The Misfit,” for good reasons.
It’s important that we live consciously with our things that go bump in our nights, to reacquaint and befriend the fairy tales in our lives, to move toward the light at the end of our tunnels, to explore those underground springs, and to follow those familiar eight challenging words “The only way out is in and through.”