About Fear

                There is a threshold.  You can gently push it back, stretching it further and further out.  But it is none the less a threshold that must be regarded and treated delicately.  Same as a muscle that is strained under inappropriate loads, or pushed again and again until a bag of feathers becomes like bricks.  Without rest, or pushed too quickly and the things is good for nothing.  In the arms it is a torn or strained bicep, in the mind it manifests as fear.  More on fear

After weeks of traversing knife edged ridges flanked on either side by thousand foot drops, gusts of wind measuring easily 30 knots; or tip toeing as quietly and softly below cornices ready to expire, would trigger avalanche upon the in terms of avi knowledge; and now a walk into the lodge paralyzes me with fear.  Returning to ‘civilization’ sinks dread in me.

And though this is no sort of civilization by standards of the civilized, rather the gathering of mad men, maladjusted, once aged animals (by the skin and roles of humanity), I fear the customs and impositions that come with human company.

Why not believe or at least use the fantastic as a model?  Why do we shy away from ideal?  It is not to say we should romanticize, project, expect, then delegitimize what is not our ideal, our imagination of what should be, upon people, cultures, the world, ourselves.  But it would not be wrong to live our own lives by the dreams of fantasies that we would have other cultures or persons be even if only in our fantasies alone.

Let me begin by prefacing that though I will speak in absolutes and will believe them, at no point am I declaring ‘truths’.  This is not to say that I will not stand behind ideas with conviction, proving a pain in the ass, but it does indicate that I will attempt to be aware of my own dogmas and at no time will come to conclusions that I would deem ‘fact’.

Fear is the indication of a lack of enough (subjectively determined in reference to the expectations of the beholder) mental or emotional strength to a specific exposure.  Risk is the potential for change within a given exposure.  It is typically used in reference to unwanted outcomes but the descriptive notion of ‘unwanted’ is limited to a fragment of a linear progression and also to a narrow focus on an aspect of being rather than the whole of person and being within space.  Context and expectation are therefore essential components in understanding what is perceived as Risk to the subject.  Risk is also traditionally used in terms of loss; transformation or change are perhaps more truthful terms for the occurrence.  And threshold might better define the limits of Fear as well as the limits of hazards- in other words the point at which change (wanted, unwanted, or unnoticed) occurs.

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