• “It’s an emotion that rarely exists in the present moment. Often it needs the past or future to feed on, a feedback loop to keep it alive.”
• “I’ve found it useful to think of it as a well-meaning hijacker, one that lives and dies by a single code: keep her safe at all costs. It’s hard not to feel some gratitude toward fear when it’s conceptualized this way.”
  • Faulty smoke alarm analogy for dysfunction
• Fear affected by risk perception— factors like trust in what’s supposed to protect us, agency/control (WhT we fear cars less than planes), whether we chose it
• “The true resistance here, then, is our attention. As technology ethicist James Williams writes in Philosophers Take On the World: “In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation.””
• Search for a fear “cure” can escalate into things like OCD
• “... part of what keeps fear alive is the pursuit of relief. I think of the relief as the comedown...”
• Exposure-response therapy: prevention of response is just as, if not more important than, exposure itself
  • Principles similar to Buddhist ones of drawing out pain
• Indigenous view of fear: seeks transcendence and interconnectedness— “Once an immediate fight, flight, or freeze response is chosen for good or bad, any remaining fear becomes a catalyst for practicing a virtue...”
  • Nature doesn’t exist to serve the self, but rather is a vast resource for us to learn from

Only tenderness seems to do anything worthwhile to fear. Only patience and curiosity can give it what it needs to morph or leave or stay.

• What to do in the face of fear? “[S]quare your shoulders and face the thing. Practice impulse control. Learn how to wait. Expose yourself to what scares you. Call upon the courage of your ancestors, the courage of the earth, and, if you’re so inclined, the courage of your past self.”