Embrace What You Fear

Kate and I were watching the latest episode of Survivor last night, and were pretty disturbed by one of the brief, wild animal-centric transitional shots they featured. It was a ball of spiders, a massed collective of at least 40 black, nickel-sized spiders, clustered in on each other, sleeping in a fist-sized clump in the middle of a web. They were still at the beginning of the shot, and then...ERUPTION! They all start moving at once, tripling the size of the globe in one second and transforming a mildly creepy discovery for an errant Survivor into an all out holocaust of visual terror. It was creepy. But not as creepy as I would have found it years ago.

Yes. I'm still a little creeped out by spiders. Not that I have any problem killing them. I used to do that on sight, back when spiders really gave me the heebie jeebies. Getting up close and personal to kill them was a far more palatable prospect than leaving them be and later waking up with one crawling on my face.

But I don't kill them anymore. Years ago I was struck with the hypocrisy of what I was doing. I would kill a spider the instant I saw one, regardless of what it was doing, generally when it wasn't posing any threat to me. And yet, I hoped very much that they would leave me alone when I didn't expect it. So I made a deal with spiderkind. I agreed to leave them be as long as they did the same for me. No more preemptive killings in exchange for an assuaging of my fear of midnight meetings in the back alleys of my pillow.

I worked. It didn't take long for me to lose most of my fear of spiders. Not only did I stop killing them, but I started capturing them live and relocating them outdoors to save them from still kill-happy roommates. And I've almost never encountered one in a face-to-face setting. I have once or twice, and those spiders no longer walk the planet. But they broke the truce and paid the price.

Of course my pact with the "spirit" of the spider exists only in my head. The fact that I haven't encountered more spiders in violation of the agreement has as much to do with the truce as Ernie from Sesame Street's success in keeping crocodiles at bay by putting a banana in his ear.

Bert: "Ernie, why do you have that banana in your ear?" Ernie: "To keep the crocodiles away." Bert: "But there are no crocodiles here...ever." Ernie: "Good, then it's working!"

That bit is one of the few I remember from my childhood television viewing, and I constantly find places it applies. What Ernie and I have done is embraced our fear, using a device to dull its impact. Over time the device is no longer necessary because the fear fades away. Ultimately fear, focused on imaginary dangers, is a useless, potentially crippling reaction, one that is unfortunately part of the human experience. But it's a very freeing experience when you confront the fear and let it go.