without fear

 Hi. It's Tuesday, and I got snail mail.

The most stunning change imaginable is being able to live without fear. This is what the outside of the envelope from a foundation seeking money told me, and I couldn’t agree more. Reading more inside the envelope, I heard my mom’s voice intoning that could be us, you should be grateful, and I am. The fears I face seem small in comparison to the pictures and descriptions of river blindness in Uganda, about which I can do but very little, but I face them daily.

   It seems small, for instance, that I’m afraid to be here on the world wide web, spilling my thoughts for anyone out there to examine. It’s so huge, the www, so much bigger than I or anyone can grasp; so bright and shiny, a world digitally enhanced and without blemish - or so dark and dangerously fascinating, conspiracy theories abounding. Do I really want to be here? What if I say something wrong or fail to give credit where it is due. What if I unknowingly plagiarism or commit libel and am sued and lose everything? This is where my past newspaper experience leads my fears.

An endless audience is scary, and so is endless knowledge. I wonder if it might be driving some of us a little bit crazy, as our tribally oriented minds try to catch up with instant global communication, information, and mail order.  There’s no one it doesn’t touch; even the very elderly gentleman up the street who has never touched a computer. He hears the wealth of information from his family, he is subject to global shopping through his global TV. There’s no denying it.

It seems to run away with a lot of us. Like any overindulgence or addiction, it can take our lives away. I bet we all know about somebody who lost some part of their lives or fortunes to internet something or other.  So maybe, probably, we’d better catch up if we want to live somewhat balanced and sane lives, which for me translates into peaceful sleep at night and anxiety free living. The internet, so far, hasn’t been helping me with that. Facts and trivia, not shopping, are what I look for, and the search engines invite me to stay up nights and ask questions, which they are able answer in a few million different ways. The net also makes it easy for me to insert my foot into my mouth in a really big way.

Global Socialization, I heard the net called recently, and the man who called it that to me also confessed to a certain despair over all that great stuff available on the internet, all those amazing tools and devices and toys and books that he couldn’t have and knew he probably would never get. It was overwhelming and unattainable. And all that information about what’s going on everywhere. Maybe we need a new psychology that includes globalization, he suggested. The Beast, I heard it called. This was before I returned to and explored the internet after a long boycott.

But being a writer, and pretty frustrated with what’s had to become of newspapers in competition with the www, I thought I’d face my fears and hook up to the world wide web. Since I’m hooked up,  I got online last week  to order trees from a catalogue I’d gotten snail mail. Since I was there, it was easy to click on the top ten related sites of interest.

 Almost three hours later I came to and pulled myself out of the amazingly beautiful world of cherry tree images and information and best deals and free shipping, returned to the first site, and ordered my trees, my original intent.  I couldn’t believe it had been so long. I felt kind of dazed and dumb, and my house and landscaping looked pretty drab and shabby and unenhanced. It took me a while to get back on track and pick up a shovel.

Shopping, I think , is just the tip of that iceberg, the most alluring one and possibly the safest.  Alongside shopping and oh so much bigger is the globalization of information and communication. Countless voices – like mine and yours – giving their opinions; endless information about everything under the sun in every corner of every population and government and medical school, vivid images of war and starving children, Guinea worm and  Ebola, tsunamis and mudslides and melting glaciers. Last night I found out my second toe wasn’t supposed to longer than my big toe, of all things!

 You name it, we can know about it. We can see it. And we want to know, it’s just a lot to take in. Actually, it can’t be taken in. It can’t be ignored, and it can’t be grasped or controlled by any one mind or search engine. It’s alive and slippery and moving and never, never holds still.

There’s really very little most of us can do about most of the stuff we find out about, but people everywhere want to do something to improve on the quality of their lives and can’t help it. It’s our nature. We all want to change or prevent what we see as wrong with our lives, and that’s how we got where we are now.

And  now, pretty suddenly, within the course of a short generation,  our lives include their lives; and theirs, ours. There’s so much more for us to think about and improve on. Globalization. This is good.

I think for most of us, knowing and seeing  makes us feel something. Concern, sorrow, judgment or anger, fear or responsibility. We feel something, maybe we send a little electric cash to the cause of our choice, then - it’s over. We can’t do anything about it and that leaves us with a kind of loose ended anxiety and vague fear. A flood of do something hormones have been released by our feelings – which can’t tell the difference between their tsunami and ours -  into our bloodstream;  but there’s nothing we can do. Maybe we stick that little discomforting thought away, deny it. Without an outlet or end to the problem, those hormones keep our bodies and brains and emotions in a state of unhealthy imbalance. Our thoughts get scrambled, and it’s easier to develop some degree of anxiety and depression. Not good.

But armed with that info, we might be able to break the cycle and figure out what we can do. Maybe most of what is left for us to do is to think about the world of information and images and opinions that we’re bombarded with; to face it and learn how to deal with feelings of anxiety as they crop up, before they knock us off balance. We can do that. We can learn to control our feelings and thoughts.

When we do, when as a global society we have learned to live our lives free of fear and anxiety, we’ll be making better decisions. Solutions to problems like disease and world hunger can only come easier when we’re in our right minds and sleeping peacefully.

We can do this.

©Melissa Falls 2014