Fear of the Unknown
Tue June 24th 2008
Many of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen next in our lives and so we spend a lot of time and energy trying to control everything that happens in our day-to-day activities. Those of us who act like this are commonly referred to as “control freaks”. It’s not the healthiest way to behave, but I think that we do it, at least in part, because we’re not comfortable with trying to figure things out “on-the-fly” and risking failure. It can be pretty exhausting, and is this kind of behavior really helping us anyway?
The thing that we need to realize is that we’re basically paralyzing ourselves by being so scared of the unknown. Our fear causes us to limit our experiences to only those few that we feel that we can control. We’re missing out on all kinds of things that could teach us about so much about ourselves, like how we act under pressure and how our minds work in less structured situations. Maybe we’re really good at it! Or maybe we’re really bad at it, but we can learn to get better. We’ll never know if we never try.
Without uncertainty, life is just the repetition of outworn memories. There’s no evolution in that, and when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy and decay. – Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success)
Sure, there’s always the risk of screwing something up or of flat-out failure, but most failures aren’t going to kill us. In fact, we may be able to learn more about ourselves from our failures than any carefully planned-out activity. Oops! That didn’t work, so we’ll do it differently next time! I mean, how much is it really going to matter if we don’t plan our two-week vacation down to the minute? Yes, it’s possible that we may miss out on some “must-see” attractions that we wanted to squeeze in, but maybe it would be more fun to just wing it, for once. Just think of the adventures we could have by keeping an open mind and just going with the flow. We could experience some amazing things that very few, if any, other people get to do. Of course it’s possible that we’ll get lost in our wanderings, but maybe we’ll find something amazing that we didn’t know about at our unexpected destination. Most likely, we’ll be able to come out of these unplanned experiences just fine, as long as we remember to use common sense.
I’ve always admired those people who are able to dive head-first into unknown situations and who are able to take a “let’s figure it out as we go along” attitude. But, getting to that point from a “control freak” status takes some doing. It is often suggested to us scaredy-cats that we just do something where it is quite possible that we might fail, but that the failure would be relatively inconsequential. Like, maybe we’ve been wanting to try a new restaurant in an unfamiliar part of a big city. We may have avoided even attempting to get there in the past because we’re scared of getting miserably lost and wasting time. Well, we should pick a day when we have no other commitments so that the time issue is no longer a factor. Then we fill up the gas tank and take a map, a GPS navigation system or another person who can help us find our way there. If we get lost, we use the tools we have to figure it out or we stop and ask for help. Yes, it will be pretty stressful for those of us who are not used to not knowing exactly where we are and exactly where we’re going, but it won’t kill us.
I know that we control freaks have a tendency to start worrying about the “what-ifs” in these kinds of situations before they even begin, but that’s exactly what the problem is. We worry about things that haven’t even happened yet and may not even happen. We just need to learn to relax a bit and see how things turn out. If we have the intellect and skills to plan our lives in excruciating detail, we certainly have the skills to make good decisions, even on the fly. We just need to learn to trust ourselves and our abilities. Most likely, everything will end up being just fine. Just start by taking baby steps and we’ll be jumping off of airplanes in no time! Ok, maybe not.
If we limit ourselves because of fear, we can potentially miss out on getting to know who we really are and what we’re capable of doing. If we don’t ever encounter any new experiences, we limit our intellectual, emotional, spiritual growth as human beings and life can get pretty dull that way. Maybe by allowing ourselves to take more risks and trying new things with less fear, we can break out of our mundane lives and develop into better people than we are now.
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