Good evening ladies and gentleman

So another month has ended, the sky is filled with the familiar orange glow of autumn, the leaves dropping from the trees,  daylight starting to play second place to our now early evening dose of purple darkness and the stiff autumn wind signalling a fast approaching winter.  With the recent occurrence of Halloween and the “Fright Night” spectaculars, it got me to thinking about how we seem to be so much more capable of dealing with problems and fears than we think, based on the way we see them.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, then you will now anything and everything i contemplate revolves around the idea of choice. We have a choice to see things in a certain way, to do things in a certain way and its this choice that determines how we feel and how we react to things and people that are in our lives. This idea also can be used as a vessel to try and understand our fascination with fear.

Modern day society seems to be intertwined with some form of fear. Of love, of life, commitment, spiders, water, clowns, even long words. We are so good at being scared if we are told we have some form of “issue” – “oh you suffer from arachnophobia” therefore we limit ourselves to avoid any contact with those of the eight legged species, or anything even remotely related to the feeling that spiders give you. Just because we are told something, we think this somehow makes us worse, further away from “perfection,” so we hide from it, act as if it doesn’t exist by avoiding the situation or any context where this fear may come into the public domain. We seem to work the logic that if people can’t see it- it doesn’t matter and isn’t ever going to affect us or the way we live.

Now i’m not saying that those suffering from a fear of spiders are perfectly capable of sitting in a room full of them, however i think Halloween shows how amazingly capable we are at dealing with fear. We choose during Halloween to dress up as spiders, clowns, ghouls and ghosts, go off to parties full of spider webs and “scary” things. These sort of things are what is considered in the general, more traditional sense of scary, but think about it. 364 days of the year,  we can all  be caught off our guard, unsettled, confused and sometimes, if only for a second, slightly fearful. This immediate fear is interesting because it can make life surprising, as a predictable future is one we have already experienced. (Alan Watts)

The point is, throughout the random surprise fears, phobias and avoidance of certain situations and contexts, there is a fundamental constant, every year, for so many people. This idea that its bad to be scared, that you shouldn’t be scared of anything, because this somehow makes us “better.”

The 31st October is a brilliant day in a way, because we don’t see fear as a negative issue during Halloween. The point of Halloween is to be scared, as its a “scary” day. Why do children dress up in scary costumes and knock on doors scaring people? Why do we go to Halloween themed nights, parties with scares and darkness, jumping at shadows? We do this because on this day, for we can see the fear and see it for what it is. Just a feeling, an idea that something “might” happen or “might not” happen.

We see fear as a positive thing during October 31st, so react to it in a much different way. The fear of a particular thing, way of living or ideological way of living doesn’t disappear during Halloween, but the way we see it is so much different and so much more powerful.

The only thing to fear is fear itself. Halloween is so much proof of this. We can be so convinced we suffer with a debilitating fear of something, we end up modifying and molding our lives to avoid it, to the point where we could be missing out on something wonderful. We feel like we have to live with this fear though and deal with what we know is a huge risk everyday. This risk bothers us, this thing that we could be missing out in our lives, while we sit in our safe little box, we sometimes consider having a little peek over, only to throw the lid back on again, deluding ourselves that we are settled, “happy” in our little box.

Yet we don’t need to do this, as we prove every 31st October we are capable of dealing with fear by choosing to see it in a different way. We don’t really every fear lifestyles, mental or physical issues, more the way they make us feel. Halloween shows what we are capable of because we choose to see the whole idea of fear and what it means to us in modern society differently, yet ignore this wonderful way of thinking for the rest of the year.

We live and choose to think in a much more unlimited way during Halloween and i think maybe if we chose to see our fears in a different way, regardless of what that fear is, we could revolutionize the way we see fear, as we could see that the only thing to fear is fear itself. Everything else is just social additions, us convincing ourselves that the feeling of “fear” is rational, putting it to an object so wee don’t have to deal with it, instead just hide from it.

For this, even if we don’t see it, is a choice to think better feeling thoughts. and a victory (no matter how small) in the battles for our Thinking Evolution. I hope you had a brilliantly scary Halloween.

Any stories of fear and the journey to overcome them id love to hear them.

Yours, with a jump and a fright

DR

Random (scarier [hopefully]) motivational picture