You can deny fear, face it courageously, or succumb to it. You can be blithe, defensive, or paranoiac.
I was never a very fearful person, though I was also somewhat risk-averse, and I occasionally avoided situations and refrained from certain endeavors for fear of failure and rejection.
I am not referring to abstract fears, however. I am referring to fear of events that will almost certainly happen. At my present age, an age that many people never reach, an age when one's contemporaries sicken and die, it would be stupid for me not to be afraid for myself, for my wife, and for my relatives and friends. I can distract myself from this fear, but I cannot deny the reality of impending loss. My only strategy for dealing with this condition is to keep myself busy and enjoy what I can.
Most people, if they thought about things objectively, would be fearful about the future, even if they live in a comfortable, secure, and stable corner of the world.
Recently I saw an interesting, if slow-moving, Romanian movie called Bacalaureat (Graduation), in which we see a man's life fall to pieces all at once. The film begins when a rock is thrown through the hero's living room window, either a case of random vandalism or a hostile act directed against him - we never know. The smashing of the window symbolizes and initiates a concatenation of events in which everything goes wrong. At the beginning of the film he is a respected physician. At the end he is being investigated by the police for corruption.
Dramatic and precipitous downfalls are more common than we like to think. I have met people whose life savings were wiped out by Ponzi schemes. One thinks one is financially secure, and then everything collapses. Being Jewish, I constantly think of the Holocaust. Even the survivors are people whose entire world was destroyed in a few short years. Security is illusory.
Aside from my age, I have other good reasons to fear. I live in Jerusalem, a city that has known destructive earthquakes. I live in Israel, a country prone to terrorist attacks as well as military threats, but such threats are hardly unique to Israel. No one knows whether an enraged gunman will open fire on the mall where one shops, the restaurant where one is eating, or the school where one's children study, whether North Korea will fire a nuclear missile at the United States, or Russia will invade Western Europe.
We all live under the threat of environmental disaster, and, now that Donald Trump has been elected, the whole world faces political instability. Can anyone say with confidence that in 2020, when the next US presidential elections are held, the world will be a better, safer place?
A psychologist whom I know once said, ironically, that people in clinical depression are more realistic than healthy people.
I was never a very fearful person, though I was also somewhat risk-averse, and I occasionally avoided situations and refrained from certain endeavors for fear of failure and rejection.
I am not referring to abstract fears, however. I am referring to fear of events that will almost certainly happen. At my present age, an age that many people never reach, an age when one's contemporaries sicken and die, it would be stupid for me not to be afraid for myself, for my wife, and for my relatives and friends. I can distract myself from this fear, but I cannot deny the reality of impending loss. My only strategy for dealing with this condition is to keep myself busy and enjoy what I can.
Most people, if they thought about things objectively, would be fearful about the future, even if they live in a comfortable, secure, and stable corner of the world.
Recently I saw an interesting, if slow-moving, Romanian movie called Bacalaureat (Graduation), in which we see a man's life fall to pieces all at once. The film begins when a rock is thrown through the hero's living room window, either a case of random vandalism or a hostile act directed against him - we never know. The smashing of the window symbolizes and initiates a concatenation of events in which everything goes wrong. At the beginning of the film he is a respected physician. At the end he is being investigated by the police for corruption.
Dramatic and precipitous downfalls are more common than we like to think. I have met people whose life savings were wiped out by Ponzi schemes. One thinks one is financially secure, and then everything collapses. Being Jewish, I constantly think of the Holocaust. Even the survivors are people whose entire world was destroyed in a few short years. Security is illusory.
Aside from my age, I have other good reasons to fear. I live in Jerusalem, a city that has known destructive earthquakes. I live in Israel, a country prone to terrorist attacks as well as military threats, but such threats are hardly unique to Israel. No one knows whether an enraged gunman will open fire on the mall where one shops, the restaurant where one is eating, or the school where one's children study, whether North Korea will fire a nuclear missile at the United States, or Russia will invade Western Europe.
We all live under the threat of environmental disaster, and, now that Donald Trump has been elected, the whole world faces political instability. Can anyone say with confidence that in 2020, when the next US presidential elections are held, the world will be a better, safer place?
A psychologist whom I know once said, ironically, that people in clinical depression are more realistic than healthy people.
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