One Emotion to Rule Them All

"...what humans ultimately fear is nothing" "That makes no sense..." he began to protest. A sharp gesture with a black-gloved hand cut him off. "Not of nothing...not like you." The hat inclined downward in something approximating a nod of respect. "They fear it all coming to an end and that, as it we're, being that." It paused to light a black cigarette, the void where its face should be simply drinking the light. "They fear becoming nothing..."

I have asked myself this many times, what is it which makes a human most human, what makes a human most essentially human, what defines people?

Fear. Small word, many meanings, many interpretations, many manifestations... Fear of failure, fear of change, fear of what other people might think of you or not think of you, fear of belonging or not belonging, fear of difference, fear of control or lack thereof. Ultimately fear of the one thing human beings have a knowledge of which all other creatures on the Earth appear to lack understanding of; death.

You see, it is a consideration, quite a large one, in a series that involves immortals of many kinds; they fear death or are they immune to such things? If they do not fear death what do they fear instead?

The Fear of the Known

So what does it boil down to? Where am I going with this? Well, all the other fears which rule human lives, I think, are rooted in fear of death. How so? Well we all fear death and are uncertain of what comes thereafter thus we worry and obsess about how we shall be remembered when we are gone, what our legacy shall be, what we leave behind.

Politicians worry about how History will remember them; average people about how their family and descendants will remember and honour them. So they spend what little time they have (never knowing how long their allotted span shall be) in worry and fear of being accepted, acknowledged and thought of. It does afterall have a large affect on life does it not, spending the majority of it (the adult portion) feeling the weight of the one certainty in life (that we have it for rent only and that the time shall come to return our loan) but never knowing when it shall end....

I know when it shall end and have to take my lesson to heart and realize how many of my fears are misplaced.

So why be afraid of change, or others' opinions, of what I'll have time to do?

I know I will be here for a period of time, I will live and have life for that period of time. I had dreams before of time beyond the time I had left to me, of old age, old things I might see or experience and those dreams are not to be but they may never have been anyway; I, under other circumstances, would not have known and....well you know the story.

To fear known consequences, those of a failure to act as you know you should perhaps?

So to live without fear, without unnecessary fear (logical fears have value, fear of an angry animal, a rapidly approaching vehicle, of hurting someone's feelings) ... to sensibly fear the Known, how that's sensible. Fearing the know is wise and a good survival trait.