Fear and Curiosity
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I’ve been thinking about fear lately. From what all the psychologists say, we are programmed to be fearful. Is that just the wind shaking the bush or is there a predator behind there? 9 times out of 10, it’s the wind, but that one time we just assume it’s the wind and it’s actually a bear, we are done. Our genes, whatever they are worth, are gone. (That’s one thing if you plan on having children, and maybe the thought of not having children excludes those genes on in the best way anyway, so good riddance right?)
Anyway, fear is important. Still, if we are living off of fear all the time, we are stuck in a pattern of reaction. One way to get out of the loop is to be curious. There was a book I read recently called “High Conflict” by Amanda Ripley. In it, she talks about conflict and one of the concepts that really made me understand how we tick is that about curiosity and how we can’t have fear and curiosity at the same time. Here’s a link to her article in Medium that explores it further.
It’s a natural remedy to solving fear. We can understand why the bear came to camp rather than always just react to it. Maybe there’s a den right next to us. Maybe something is causing them to be more desperate. Asking questions puts us in a different mindset.
For writing, this is relevant because so much fear prevents us from following our dreams. Fear prevents us from acting. While it is built to stop us from failing, especially when said bears are involved, it also stops us from succeeding if it’s not fully understood (from learning about the bear or if you’re a hunter, from stopping the bear from attacking the village…hypothetically anyway. Most animals are more afraid of you than you are of them, but not too many people are curious to learn that.)
Anyway, I decided to be more curious about my writing routine. I hit a dry spell where I didn’t write for 10 days. At first, I cast it off as just needing some time to recover which I think we all are guilty of doing. I’ve written about time a lot before, but I am guilty of thinking I could only write in the evenings. I’ve tried mornings, and they didn’t work for me, but something had to change. Instead of giving into fear and pushing myself to write in the evenings or worse, give up on writing, I decided to let curiosity take control. Now, I haven’t forgotten about my quote from Steven Pressfield: “Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.” I think curiosity is the gap between going from fear to sustainable motivation, at least in my case.
I was curious and made a list of positives and negatives from writing in the evenings vs. writing in the mornings. While I’ll always advocate to write whenever it feels right for you, it’s good to test your theories. So far, I have written more consistently switching to mornings. Some findings:
I will 99% of the time have more consistent free time in the mornings. Something has to give, and I still get 8 hours of sleep despite getting up at 6:30AM (30-60 minutes earlier) than I normally do before work. In the evenings, other engagements come through like seeing family, family stopping by, going out, dinner running late, work running late, etc. But mornings? Well, those remain untouched.
I can go through my day knowing I have written. Despite anything that happens that day, I know I got some words down.
I have my evenings free to refill my well. Unrestricted and in full. This is a welcome change. And I can still write, but I don’t feel like I necessarily have to keep writing, especially if I’m mulling over in my subconscious where the story should go next.
Anyway, I wouldn’t have found any of that out if I remained afraid of testing it. If I feared it would make me too groggy for work. If anything, I feel like I have more energy overall. That could be the seasons changing, more light in the mornings while I sip some coffee, or maybe feeling a bit healthier than I usually do, but regardless, it was good to question my initial assumptions and plow forward. (You know what they say about people who assume? They make an ass out of u and me.) While this is great advice to take to anything in life whether it’s the news, people’s statements, education, work, etc., I loved it for writing. Life is too short to not learn something new…whether it’s just a fun fact or something deeper about yourself.
Happy writing! Thanks for reading!
