Fear is one of the fundamental emotions that all living creatures experience from time to time. It has various functions but the most crucial one, is to protect from the outside dangers. The world is full of dangers that threaten our existence and humans are particularly fragile species. Physical and emotional vulnerability sets the limits to our abilities to accommodate the chaotic nature of the environment. Throughout our evolutionary development we have done our best to build solid support structures to enable our fundamental capacity to be in and with the world. These artificial systems help us to know when to trust, fight or run away. We make agreements about shared values and establish rules giving a sense of safety which is necessary to grow, develop and support the existence of the system itself.
Fear subsides when order is in place. Insufficient amount of information about the surrounding is interpreted as potential danger, which can come from anywhere. When we can't have a grip on the situation, lacking points of connection, we become disoriented it causes a stress response which leads to us experiencing fear. Chaos is threatening as it is impossible to control or make predictions. Lack of control induces fear therefore we strive to have as much control as possible. Which is rather an impossible goal to achieve. As everything is in constant change, demanding certainty is a desire that can never be fulfilled. We did manage to come up with quite a few notions that help us to avoid thinking about chaotic nature of the world. We remove chances, randomness and uncertainty out of the equation in order to provide safety, while at the same time, by doing so, we decrease our capacity to function within the disordered rudimentary qualities of the universe.
Here is a basic recipe for fear: ask a stranger to blindfold you, take your clothes away, take you to an unknown place and leave you there without food and means for communication, and all of it while you are sleeping. When you wake up, you’ll be terrified, all the instincts for survival will kick in, revealing superpowers you had no idea about. That is where it becomes interesting, except the protection that fear gives us it is also responsible for adaptability. In the world of chaos, the real world juxtaposed to the contracted ordered one, the ability to be adaptive comes in handy. Being able to co-exist with the fear and use it allows for flexibility, especially now when the speed of change is increasing exponentially.
I see we are facing two things at the moment, the complexity of the world is more exposed and accessible to everyone that leads to the feeling of disorientation which induces fear, while at the same time the speed of change within this complexity is increasing making the adaptation process very difficult to undergo. Uneasy task that requires endurance. Staying with our fears and being able to hold them becomes a strategy for protection. Only by embracing chaos we can build order which we can use to grow and develop, but once it falls we can build it again. Rising from the ashes of fear like a phoenix. Fear that gives birth to a new circle of life is the fear where one can bear the uncertainly and unpredictability adapting to the new order bound to crash.