Funny thing happened to me on the way to the blog…
On Monday, I posted a seemingly random series of mystery photos, and amidst some of the most brilliantly creative responses I’ve received to date, there arose an unexpected theme:
Fear.
I suppose if I were a cleverer woman, I might have intentionally constructed this theme in honor of Halloween. But I’m not. Sometimes interesting things happen in the most haphazard of ways. For some reason, the common thread linking these photos became fear, and this got me thinking. It’s almost Halloween, the time when people disguised themselves as the very things that frightened them the most in order to ward off evil spirits. So what is it that we are afraid of? What keeps us awake at night? The unknown. Beasts. Death. Words. Pain. The dark.
But are we born afraid? Is fear driven by nature or nurture, or a combination of both? My own personal fears cross the spectrum of rational to irrational. I worry about getting cancer, but then I also frequently imagine myself falling and smashing all my teeth out. I’m afraid of dying alone, and I also worry about being trapped underwater, maybe in a boat, or maybe in a swimming pool which has suddenly developed an impenetrable surface. Which of these fears is irrational? None of them? All of them?
I suppose that sometimes we’re just too close to what we think torments us to truly understand what we should really be afraid of. A friend and I were talking recently about self-awareness, and how we often feel that we are being overt in our intentions, when in reality they are too subtle for others to even notice. In an enclosed space, a voice always sounds much louder than it really is. Inside my head, everything is amplified.
Perhaps in order to demystify our fears, we just need the right combination of distance and perspective:
The unknown
Beasts
Death
Words
Pain
The dark
Bonus Spooky Halloween Photos!

Filed under: Photo Quiz on October 19th, 2005