Right off the bat - What happens if you splash your boiling hot coffee on your friend you had a coffee date with ???
Something always haunts us, whether it is a flies or an upcoming test. Not only do things haunt us but, they begin to challenge us. Will you kill the flies that annoy you and will you get a good grade on your upcoming test? These things that haunt us can simply be an annoyance or a fear. The difference is that one concept focuses if we can handle the unknown and coup with it.
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Right off the bat, a common fear that fogs our minds is: death. However, death isn’t unknown to us. We hear it on the news, recorded it, see it, prevent it, and made rituals to bless the dead. Death is still frightening because we don’t know what the afterlife is. All we have is faith and theory to account our afterlife. It could be that we ascend to heaven or descend to hell. Perhaps we live a new life through reincarnation. Although, we don’t know and that is the root of all fear: ambiguity.
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At the moment of reading this passage, you might be having the urge to go to the bathroom. Of course, if you have the necessary appliances to relieve yourself you know that all is good. There is nothing to fear of but, it could be a life or death situation for someone who constantly relieves themselves in the bathroom. It’s these people who begin to fear that something is going on with them. Something that they don’t know but know it’s bad or potentially bad. We, humans, have the tendency to be very sensitive if one thing doesn’t seem to go as planned because our emotions seem to fuel us. If you drop coffee on your pants you either become furious or perhaps you just clean it up without an ounce of anger yet, you don’t become entangled by fear because your brain has already deduced what has happened because it has seen it happen to someone else, was told by someone else, or through past events can intellectually make a inference. You know what happens when coffee spills on you so you don’t need to fear the outcome. However, what happens if you splash your boiling hot coffee on your friend you had a coffee date with? At that moment you become scared because you have never spilled hot coffee on anyone’s face but you do know that it burned your clothes; you do have a fragment of what will be the outcome of your friend’s face. Yes, it’s a scary and possibly morbid matter however, understanding the concept of fear will help you get through it.
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So what is the meaning of ambiguity since it’s the common reason for fear. Ambiguity is simply uncertainty and obscurity of an ordeal. There is blatancy in the situation so all you’re left with is what your senses can conjure and past references stored in your brain. Our brains are capable of storing information that spans much more than our very own lifespan you would think that we would have the solution to any ambiguous matter but we just aren’t there yet. We have centuries of unanswered questions we have to dive in to and so, ambiguity will be the lead factor of fear.
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How can we overcome our fears? The usual answer is to confront them but there are fears that we can’t confront because we know that it will lead to either our doom or leave a scar on us for the rest of our life. So what would be the viable solution? For a monotheist, it would be their belief in god’s salvation. If the time comes where there is a fear that has only one outcome which is death, you can overcome it with the power of faith and retribution and that you will be forever redeemed in heaven. However, that isn’t the case for all of humanity. The only other way for us humans to counterattack our fear is by submitting to it even if it’s fatal. We can’t surgically remove that one fear out of our brains yet, we can only confront it. By confronting that fear, ambiguity becomes relinquished because you know the answer. The answer, that could be fatal, is what will end fear because you know the outcome. If you know that a disease has taken over you and you know the best thing to do is live, then keep on living.
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So why are we damned with fear? There are many theories with this one, in my opinion, being the most favorable. Fear along with suffering has its role for a reason. Just like the sun and moon, we must have pleasure and suffering; knowledge and fear. We see these two emotions as bad because they feel bad. Yet, suffering can be seen as useful. In the Disney film, WALL-E, we witness a world where everything is done for humanity. It’s a pleasurable world without suffering but, it only led to humanity’s damnation. A world without suffering means that we won’t see our mistakes. We become blind because we only see happiness within ourselves and thus we repeat our mistakes endlessly till it becomes our doom. Suffering changes that. With suffering we gain a bit of knowledge of ourselves and even though it hurts a lot, we get an answer. It’s a sad concept but in the end it’s beneficial. Fear causes suffering yet, confronting our fear will lead to a solution and the end of such suffering.
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Humanity is both blessed and damned with emotions. Without emotions we wouldn’t be able to be happy, loved, hated, sad, or angry. Yet, imagine life without emotions. It would be a joyless life where people cannot connect and we could only be monotone and blatant. We wouldn’t be able to love one and another nor grieve together. This could be a good thing to some however a hell for many. It is why we must do things together as humans. Fear can be eased with the presence of another. Whether it is friends, family, or perhaps a stranger; fear doesn’t need a certain human being just anyone who can tell you “things will be all right” and all shall be well in the end.