One is hard-wired in the most primitive part of your brain, put there to keep you alive. The other is as much cultural as anything and a good deal is constructed to keep you in line. It’s said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, a hero just one. Thomas Hobbes, whom I discussed in some detail last week, always said he was born a twin, the other being fear. He lived to be 91 (in that most turbulent of centuries, the 17th) and died in his bed. No doubt, he worried too much. His masterpiece, Leviathan, argues fiercely and cogently for the over-arching necessity for a protective state.
Culture warriors today call that the ‘nanny state’, a verbal stick to beat anyone who professes to want at least a functional government that takes care of national security, health, education, and a lot more beside. Because of where we are, right now, there is a lot of real fearfulness around, genuine enough, and not to be confused with the confected fearfulness engendered by those with a vested interest in fostering it. The list is long and tedious.
It’s added to, these days, by weather forecasters; perhaps you’ve noticed. My theory is that what I would describe as ‘over’ forecasting began in general forecasts after the 1987 hurricane, which the Met Office memorably missed. For sailors, with regard to shipping forecasts, I believe this tendency started after the missed double-low depression off the Fastnet in 1979, which cost a fair few yachtsmen their lives.
I can well remember sitting in the cockpit of a yacht in the Channel in the 1980s on a balmy day, sun out, light breeze, fluffy clouds, listening to a shipping forecast, naming our area – Plymouth – and informing us that we were in a Force 6, rising to Force 7 – gale force – imminently (within 6 hours). Bemused, we scanned the horizon for the threatened winds in vain. Just saying.
Earlier today, I read the disruption planned – because the authorities are going to do it whatever happens – to schools, transport and the rest said to be caused by wet and windy conditions in the south, probable snow in the north. Well, well, and us still in winter. That’s fearfulness right there, allied with the expectation that has been engendered in all of us that ‘bad’ weather in winter will always create chaotic, deadly, or life-threatening conditions.
We’ve made ourselves risk-averse to the point where it’s becoming farcical. We’re warned about slippery conditions on railway platforms after it’s rained; about heavy winds and the threat of being off our feet; of the dangers to drivers caused by icy conditions: over and over and over again. The underlying message is: the weather is a threat, a danger, should it fall outside the tiniest of limits. In the summer, when it’s lovely and warm, we’ll be told to stay indoors again, in case we suffer heat stroke. Or get skin cancer, the newest bogeyman to have jumped out the fearfulness box.
It’s particularly ironic, this obsession with extreme weather, when it palpably isn’t anything of the sort here – yet – given that we are entering a period when the weather in these latitudes is predicted to get a whole lot worse. In the not too distant future we’re going to have the extremes of weather that have afflicted North Americans for centuries: hurricanes, tornadoes, tropical storms, massive snow storms, followed by drought and soaring temperatures. Somehow, they survive – and thrive. We are going to have to lose our fearfulness and embrace accepting a lot more ‘risk’ again.
Fear is different. There’s a good reason an awful lot of people are afraid of the dark. Long ago, when our species was young, it kept us alive, kept us alert to real danger, lurking in the night: big hungry cats, packs of wild dogs, stepping on poisonous snakes or spiders. The old adage about pumping adrenaline into the blood stream creating fright, then flight or fight is grounded in those long- ago times. The too slow would stay with the fright, frozen to the spot, then become prey either to a real threat or, perhaps, die of that same fright, which had alerted their fleeter companions to do something – anything – and quickly.
The term adrenaline junkie is used to disparage lovers of outdoor activities that allegedly mimic our ancestors’ genuine fears. But that’s simply not the case.
I would agree the term can be fitted to the kind of folk who like to ride on fairground roller-coasters, or giant ziplines set up across disused quarries, race their souped-up cars down urban streets. Too much skiing has headed in the same direction – all speed and verticality, no time for finesse or grace, or a chance to look at the stunning surroundings.
True committed practitioners of outdoor activities are in a different league. Having been, from time to time, a mountaineer, climber, caver, paraglider and microlight pilot, as well as an ocean sailor, I can genuinely say that the only time I feared for my life was on a toboggan, in the most ridiculous of circumstances. Hey, that’s real life, mixing the absurd with genuine threat.
We were on a cross country skiing holiday and the wife of the innkeeper we were staying with in Austria, Bertha, one day suggested we might like to trek up a hill to a bar at the top, then toboggan back down on one-man (or woman) sleds. We duly followed her, pulling our little sleds along behind us. Arrived at the hill-top (it really wasn’t high enough to be called a mountain), we downed several schnapps in quick succession. ‘Time to go,’ announced Bertha and, sitting down, legs pointing forward (‘you steer with your feet’), the cords attached to the front of the sled in her hands, she set off.
I went second, not as fast as she. It was March and the snow was already patchy, so progress on my sled was slow. Rounding a bend in the track I saw Bertha had stopped so I stopped as well. She pointed behind her: ‘there’s a ski run, good snow all the way down’. Without asking any more I duly slid my sled over the bank and hit the slope, very narrow and shaped like a semi-circle, with densely packed firs on either side, gathering far too much speed. The snow was hard-packed and extremely unforgiving. Within nano-seconds, I was careering down a 30-degree plus dead straight slope going faster and faster, out of control.
I realised, for the first and thankfully, as it turned out, the only time in my life, I was mortally afraid. I recall, vividly, thinking, ‘you’re going to have to throw yourself off the sled or die, so which hip do you want to break?’ All this happened in less than two, maybe three, seconds. It was genuine fear and it is as an unpleasant a sensation as you would expect. I decided to go to the right but I am left-handed and my fevered brain tossed me left. There was no time for a conscious reset. By the way, time really does slow right down in this situation, at least in the brain.
I tumbled off the sled, the slope sending me into an unfathomable black void; I came to a stop, many dozens of metres further down, badly bruised but, amazingly, otherwise intact. Recovering the sled took some effort. I sat back on it, gingerly, and took a few deep breaths; shaken, blissfully alive, probably (I don’t remember this bit) laughing with relief.
A little while later I heard, then saw, Bertha, carefully allowing her sled to negotiate the slope, followed by our companions. ‘Sorry,’ she said as she reached me, ‘I forgot it was a black run’.
We all completed it safely, edging our way down to the bottom. That event was thirty- three years ago next month. Fear, here in an instant, gone as quickly. I had no bad dreams, no after-shocks. But it taught me a rather obvious lesson: look before you leap. At least, up to a point, eh.
Subsequently, inter alia, I’ve survived my own aeroplane crash, accidently flown a paraglider in Spain backwards into a real mountain (don’t ask) and enjoyed an ‘interesting’ week in the French Alps climbing hard, notably along the Cosmic Arête, high above Chamonix. None of it was the same, trust me: perilous but controlled; every one of those and myriad other ’big outdoor’ thrilling experiences. Oh, and I’ve had more than one horse bolt, with me on board, once when leading a string of young riders (they all lived).
Fear, not fearfulness, is a positive thing. As Nietzsche memorably wrote, ‘whatever doesn’t destroy you, makes you stronger’. Please, don’t be fearful, be strong; sometimes, it’s all we have.
Here endeth this week’s lesson.
This week: Tim read Rachel Clarke’s powerful trilogy, My Life in Your Hands, Dear Life andBreathtaking, about her time as an NHS doctor, subsequently about her work as a palliative care specialist and, finally, what it was like to work in ITU during the Covid pandemic. Searing, emotional, tough to read, but brilliantly executed by a woman who passionately cares about people, and how they are looked after, right up to their final moment. As someone sagely remarked recently, the opposite of death isn’t life, it’s birth. And we may experience rebirth at any time and, perhaps seek it out more often.