I have been thinking about fear lately. Halloween is a time where people embrace the “scary” and have fun with the idea of horror and death. The community I grew up in disapproved and even went as far as to judge those who participated in Halloween. Currently, I am kind of ambivalent to the holiday, but last night a friend asked a question to those who don’t allow their children to participate in the “trick or treat”. How do they introduce the ideas of death and scary to their world view? This person experienced Halloween as an opportunity to do that with their children.
I do not have children, so I am not sure how I will handle introducing the idea of death and scary things as part of life to them in their formation. However, I think it is time to bring more of the scary things into our conversation.
What is it we are afraid of?
Why are we afraid of those things?
Take the economy or the state of the world. It is a scary thing… People did exactly what they were told to do by the experts and invest in secure money markets and they lost their security. It begs the question of what do we find our security in?
I find a lot of security in my relationships, relationship with my family and community.
I experience fear in the form of anxiety and it arises sometimes as a motivator and other times as an inhibitor. Either way my analysis or thoughts about emotion are part of my search to understand who I am. I have a core belief that looks like this: When I understand why I feel certain things I can control my actions. When I understand, I am not afraid…
I grew up in a family that did not allow me to participate in Halloween. I wonder how I might be different if Halloween was used to introduce the scary things to me…
I tend to be a reactive person, which does not work well in a community environment. A person who is filled with anxiety tends to over re-act or obsess over ideas, causing an increase in the very emotion they want to control.
Granted emotion is only a fraction of who any one person is, however it is the part that seems most real at times. Thoughts, relationships, roles we play in everyday activity are other parts of our whole. Never-the-less there is still the need for me to understand why we feel certain emotions.
