Originally published on Notes From the Fields We Know, December 13, 2012.
This is from Tumblr, December 2012 — back when I was trying to force myself to write a book of life advice for my kids while I was still in my prime. The experiment half-succeeded: I wrote fragments like this instead of a full book, and honestly, they probably wouldn’t have read it anyway. Humanity moved on from physical books.
But recently my oldest used the exact phrase “body fear” when talking about one of her physical terrors. Maybe it got through after all. If naming the feeling helped her, maybe it’ll help someone else. Posting it again feels like a small way to be useful — mourning Scott Adams too, who spent his life trying to do the same by naming what scares or traps us. Lightly edited for clarity, core unchanged.
2012
One of my goals for my children is to teach them to successfully act even though they may be afraid, tired, hungry, hot, cold, etc. Mostly, I want them to be able to act while in the grip of irrational fear.
The only way I know how to teach something like that is to model the expected behavior while under the stressor condition.
One of the genetic cards dealt to me is a fear of heights. No matter how much the stainless steel core of my will wants it to be otherwise, my body shakes, my heart races, and my mind fogs over when I get about 10 feet off the ground.
You can’t stop the physical effects. It’s body fear.
However, with time and practice, you can learn to move when your body wants to freeze and to stay still when your body wants to move. You’ll still shake though not as badly. Your heart will still pound but not race. Your mind, well, your mind will no longer fog over but will vividly imagine a thousand unreal, unpleasant things.
This is good because the lifting of the fog is the key to acting while gripped by body fear. All it takes (yeah right, “all it takes”) is to imagine counters to the unreal things. Do the imaginary counters actually work? Pretty much. At least they get you moving when you should move, staying still when you should be still and thinking when you should think.
That’s no conquest but it’s good enough.
Mammoth Falls Slide
It took me five years to work up the nerve to ride this one. Body fear stalks me constantly while I’m at Wet n’ Wild but after overcoming many, many times, I now actually enjoy some of the slides. For some reason, though, Mammoth Falls and the Tornado petrified me. I finally broke through this year and I’ve now ridden every slide in the park.
Tornado Slide
Tumblr, December 13, 2012
2026
Fourteen years later, the fear hasn’t vanished. But the practice still works. And sometimes the words echo back from the people you were trying to reach. Good enough.