Fear Comparison

Fear has become quite a focus recently. Not that more fear has come about in my life, but just something I've been noticing more, and trying to dissect more. I feel like there is a big advantage to being able to take physical risk when it comes to dealing with other types of fear in everyday life.

When riding and particularly at competitions, I feel a lot of fear. It's always there and the trick is to figure out how to perform despite it. But this fear is mostly from risk of injury. Yes there is fear of embarrassment or failure at a comp but usually if you walk away healthy, you still consider that a win of some sort.

I have never been as scared in any other situation than at the top of a comp run. And it's not even close. So getting through that sort of experience and then returning to your average daily experience with fear, feels like a walk in the park. I think some of this comes down to the risk not being that great, but also that my fear management system has been forced to grow under those conditions and is very efficient in seemly lower risk situations.

For example, starting the blogs. This is not your standard freestyle mountain biker activity and I was definitely not known for my writing throughout school. So starting this blog did have a fair bit of fear attached to it. But compared to throwing myself four meters into air upside down, It doesn't even register on the radar.

The modern world has become so safe, and for most people, physical safety is not something that they have to worry about often. But I think there is benefit to (under safe conditions) feeling some physical fear every now and then to keep an aligned perspective on what is really worth being fearful of.