In what can only be interpreted as an attempt to stir the pot, my friend asked a table full of dinner guests in Argentina last week the tantalizing question, “What scares you most in life?”
The responses ranged from “feeling that I have disappointed my children” to “not achieving the goals I had set for myself in life.”
As the fears trickled in from around the table, I was intrigued by the fact that everyone responded in a post-mortem sense. In other words, they weren’t necessarily expressing their current fears, but rather those that would haunt them should they be on their deathbed.
In our daily lives, we get into cars with people we have never met who drive recklessly around urban environments, we kitesurf in waters known to be shark-infested, and we eat foods in street markets without checking their province or sanitary status… yet, our biggest fears are related to our sensitive egos at the end of our life.
On one hand, this is pathetic. On the other hand, lucky us. Imagine if every time you got into an Uber you had a full-blown panic attack estimating the odds of a pending accident.
So what truly scares you the most? Stewing on this question we can agree that it shouldn’t be something out of your control, but it likely shouldn’t be something in your control either, right? Not achieving your goals… mate, that is fully in your control.
Last year as I was climbing Kilimanjaro I brought along a book called On Fear by J. Krishnamurti which laid out a principle that stuck with me. It read, “The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what causes fear”. When you are confronted with something immediately, there is no time for it to generate fear.
In sum, the only certainty is uncertainty, so why fear that?