Fear of Flying
I generally think Ham far braver than I so it was with unseemly joy I greeted the news that he was a “nervous flyer”. Takeoffs and landings are numbered for him, four per trip, and it struck me as odd since I greet takeoffs and landings with great joy because it means a) we’re FINALLY getting off the ground or b) we’re FINALLY landing.
Of course, given the odds, fears of flying are irrational. It’s far more dangerous to drive a car. But since I have my own kaleidoscope of irrational fears I don’t have room to talk. But my ponderance is whether or not fear increases as we age. Novelist Anne Tyler speaks of a “mushrooming sense of responsibility” as we age, but that is different than fear. On the one hand we have less to fear because we have experienced so much: we should have less a sense of urgency in so much as things unexperienced. In middle age we experience the malaise that Walker Percy writes of in “The Moviegoer”: every day becomes the Wednesday afternoon that he says becomes beset by ordinariness. One would think that ordinariness of everyday life would lead to a certain fearlessness.
Still, the saying goes “fatigue makes cowards of us all” and there’s no doubt that as we get older we become more acquainted with fatigue.
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