Article on Fear

[tdog 0]

Only once have I felt the sensation of "giving up", while in a near drowning situation, mentioned in this article... But this story has some interest to skydiving, at the end it mentions BASE and skydiving, and it relates to our sport by discussing how fear might get in the way of making good decisions...

To me the jury is still out if I believe people skydive because it is seeking fear/risk for enjoyment or gratification, or if people really enjoy to fly... I think for me, I just love to fly and be in the air and that is the long term passion that keeps me in the sport...

Now that being said, skim this article for ideas and thoughts - perhaps the discussion of the body language of fear is helpful for instructors too...

Quote

Fear Itself,
Story by Sebastian Junger, printed in National Geographic Adventure

Several years ago, in Sierra Leone, a rebel group calling itself the
Revolutionary United Front launched an offensive that overran most of
the country in a matter of days. The RUF was backed by Charles Taylor's
rogue government in Liberia and funded by illegal diamond mining in the
eastern part of the country-a story I'd been sent to cover for an
American magazine.

At the time I was up-country in the government-held town of Kenema, with
no way to get out. Fortunately, I was stranded with dozens of Lebanese
expatriates who lived in Kenema but held U.K. passports, and the British
government had no choice but to rescue us. Two Chinook helicopters
filled with British paratroopers landed outside Kenema, gathered us all
up and flew back to the capital, Freetown. I decided to skip an
evacuation flight out of the country and stayed on in the capital to see
what would happen next.

The last time the RUF had occupied Freetown, in 1999, they'd massacred
thousands of civilians and set up checkpoints where they methodically
chopped the arms off of everyone they chose not to kill. It looked like
the horror show was about to happen again, and the population was in a
panic.

I got a ride out to the front lines in a pickup truck filled with
bare-chested native fighters called Kamajors. They had ammo belts draped
across their chests, and many were strung with amulets and jungle
fetishes and little leather packages that were meant to protect them
from bullets. We arrived in the small town of Masiaka, which had fallen
to a government counterattack hours earlier, and groups of Kamajors were
rattling off clips into the watery-blue sky in celebration. After a
while an argument broke out between two commanders, and every fighter in
the plaza cocked his machine gun and backed up for a firefight that
would have killed half of them. I dropped into a drainage ditch and
waited for the shooting to start, but miraculously nothing happened.

It was clearly not a good place to be, and after a while I managed to
hitch a ride in an army jeep that was headed back to Freetown for more
ammo. I was so relieved to be out of there that I let my guard down and
failed to notice a new checkpoint on the road ahead. A dozen rebels from
an ultraviolent, unaffiliated group called the Westside Boys had emerged
from the jungle and were waving us down with their guns. I've been
stopped at plenty of checkpoints in my life, but for some reason this
one seemed different. There was something sullen and ominous in the way
the Westside Boys stood, in the way they held their guns. This time it's
for real, I remember thinking. This time it's for keeps.

The driver stopped the jeep and the Westside Boys arrayed themselves in
a semicircle around us. Their eyes were bloodshot with drugs and rage,
and they sported a nightmarish hybrid of hip-hop clothing and African
voodoo. I was with a couple of other journalists and three or four
government soldiers, and all of us sat without moving or talking,
waiting for what would happen next.

The driver of the jeep, a young soldier, was trying to explain our
presence to the rebel commander, but whatever he was saying seemed to
enrage the commander more. He shook his head and walked up to the driver
with his hand on his pistol. No one moved. If he shot the driver, he was
going to kill all of us, that much seemed clear. He screamed. We waited.
All I remember is the dozen black holes at the end of the dozen gun
barrels trained on us. Infinity was contained in those black holes and I
couldn't bear to look at them. I found myself thinking that I'd had a
pretty good life. I found myself worrying that this was going to hurt. I
didn't want it to hurt, I didn't want to be there; I just wanted it all
to go away.

One of my favorite photographs is of a fighter during Pancho Villa's
uprising in northern Mexico. He is standing before a firing squad with a
cigar clamped between his teeth and not smiling, exactly, but smirking.
You can't touch me, that smirk seemed to say, You can kill me, but you
can't touch me, and that's what will bring you down in the end. There
are many others out there just as brave as
I am. A moment after the photograph was taken, the man was dead.

I wish I could say that I faced the Westside Boys with similar bravado,
but I didn't. Maybe I just lacked a revolution or a religion or an idea
big enough to sacrifice myself for. Sometimes people ask me, What is the
most scared I have ever been as a journalist?, and invariably I think of
those ten minutes outside Freetown. I rarely talk about it, though;
death is too personal-too embarrassing, in a way-to discuss with
strangers. I've been very scared five or six times in my life, but the
only time I've readied myself for death was at that checkpoint in Sierra
Leone. It's a particular process, this readying of oneself; it's
different from simple fear. When you're scared, you're still hanging on
to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out
occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if
you've never done it before. I had the feeling that the life I was
leaving was precious, but also burdensome and complicated, and that in
some ways the burden and complexity would be a relief to give up. It
wasn't much comfort in that awful moment, but it was better than
nothing.

One of the other journalists, a middle-aged Brit who worked in
television, dealt with the fear by acting exasperated. He kept rolling
his eyes and huffing with annoyance. A photographer sitting next to me
watched dully and said nothing. I sat immobile, trying to shape my face
into a mask of disinterest. I'm sure it didn't work. I felt hollow. The
world around me-the buzzing jungle, the asphalt road, the rebels and
their ugly little guns-became a kind of abstraction, as if it all had
been painted onto a canvas backdrop from which, very soon, I would be
erased.

I recently read that there are four primary emotions-fear, sadness,
happiness, and anger-and that the facial expressions produced by these
emotions are universal in all societies of the world. In other words,
they are hardwired into our brains, and the muscles of the face contract
in ways that are involuntary and, in that sense, incapable of lying.
Lower primates don't bother trying to mask those expressions; humans do.
We're more likely to mask them when we're in groups, and we're more
likely to mask them when doing otherwise will result in punishment of
some kind. The punishment for showing anger, I suppose, is retribution
by someone who has power over us. A boss has power over us. A cop has
power over us. Drugged-up guerrilla fighters have power over us-the
ultimate power: One contraction of a trigger finger and the screen goes
blank.

Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on
survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it's
shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is
automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you
want it to or not. Your shoulders pull back and up. Your eyebrows rise,
your eyes widen. Your mouth opens and your lips draw into a grimace.
Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly
recognizable it is but also how it seems to actually produce a sense of
fear. It's as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, and the
expression can trigger fear as well as be triggered by it. Your pulse
quickens, you turn pale, and your pupils dilate. Inside your body,
adrenal glands dump epinephrine into your system and blood gets shunted
away from your skin to major muscle groups.

The mind, meanwhile, starts thinking in stark, black-and-white
terms-lucid, even if utterly unrealistic. I remember putting my arms in
front of me because that might somehow deflect what was coming. I
remember wondering if the bodies of the men in the front seats might be
able to stop the bullets before they reached me. I remember saying,
"This isn't good," to the photographer next to me, as if he could do
anything about it. He didn't answer, though-probably too preoccupied
with his own struggle to pay attention to mine.

We didn't die, of course. Something in the situation shifted, guns got
uncocked, and eventually the commander waved us on. Maybe we were never
really in danger, though two weeks later another journalist, Miguel Gil
Moreno de Mora, was killed by rebels a few miles down the road. Maybe I
was the only guy in the jeep who was worried, I don't know. None of us
said a word about it for the rest of the drive back to Freetown. When I
got back to the hotel, I was a mess. Teun Voeten, the photographer with
whom I was working, asked me how my day went. "Terrible," I said, and we
headed off to the hotel bar to talk about it. Teun had once been in a
similar situation-far worse, in fact-and he understood. The television
at the bar was playing a rerun of some West African soap opera where a
husband and wife were screaming at one another, and I found that I
couldn't bear to listen to it. Everything associated with violence-loud
voices, sudden noises-felt poisonous and threatening. I didn't want to
be exposed to it, even on television.

After a few days the experience began to fade in my mind, and by the
time I got back to New York City, I'd pretty much stopped thinking about
it. Miguel's death jolted me for a few days, but that feeling passed as
well. I went on to other foreign assignments, some of which frightened
me tremendously. Once, I found myself curled in a fetal position while
Taliban gunners pounded the hilltop I was on with Katyusha rockets. The
Katyushas came in with a nasty descending shriek that was as terrifying
as the detonations that followed. Another time I spent a week hiding
from child soldiers in Liberia because their government decided I was an
American spy. Each time I came home from one of those assignments, I
experienced strange tides of fear that came and went without
explanation. A week or two after returning from Afghanistan, I went into
a blind panic on a ski gondola because I was convinced the cable was
going to break. Intellectually I knew this wasn't going to happen, but
my body wouldn't believe me; my system flooded with epinephrine and
readied itself for the plunge. No amount of reasoning could convince it
otherwise.

Fear is by far the worst emotional experience we can have, and we do
almost anything we can to avoid it-except when we actively seek it out.
It's an odd paradox of being human that a feeling we are neurologically
wired to avoid at all costs is also one that we covet so highly. No
other animal intentionally puts itself at risk for thrills. I don't
think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes
or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and
horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated,
time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got
in the way of real life. Instead, we have the feeling that they are real
life, that everything else-the day-to-day routines that take up most of
our time-are somehow less important. It's as if the value of an
experience rises exponentially with the risk it poses to your life.

I don't point this out to glorify risk-taking or even apologize for it.
In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an
obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss
something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it
shouldn't? I wish I could report that after my experience in Sierra
Leone I had some kind of renewed appreciation for life-that I passed my
days more fully, more vividly, with more feeling. But I didn't. If
anything, I had the dismal realization that one can be robbed of life
for almost no reason at all in situations that are mundane to the point
of embarrassment.

All that I can offer is this: Something very peculiar happened to me at
that checkpoint. I let go of life, of the world, of myself. It only
happened for a few moments, but happen it did. Religious mystics might
call it a "loss of self"; psychologists know it as "dissociation." It's
a protective mechanism that produces an odd, and maybe comforting, sense
of removal from reality. Every time I've faced something frightening, I
can identify a paler version of that same dissociative process: I care
and I care and I care and then at some point everything just shuts down
and I don't care.

I used to work as a climber for tree companies, and many times I've
topped-out enormous white pines with 20 feet (6 meters) of tree above me
and another 80 feet (24 meters) of tree below. In a situation like that,
your safety depends on making just the right cut so that the top of the
tree falls forward and away rather than back on top of you. Obviously
it's a high-anxiety situation that you can really psyche yourself out
for, and I've waited five, ten minutes before starting the chain saw to
make a cut like that. I wasn't waiting for courage. I was waiting for
emptiness.

I imagine that every skydiver who steps out of an airplane, every bungee
jumper who tips off a bridge span, undergoes a similar process. Maybe
the allure of those sports isn't the much vaunted adrenaline rush they
provide, but the brief and shocking confrontation with mortality.
Somewhere in all of our futures is a checkpoint where the bastards are
actually going to pull the trigger. It may be a hospital bed, it may be
a car accident, it may be a fall from a ladder, but one way or another,
death is going to catch up with us. We're the only animal that knows
this, and we're the only animal that seems to need to practice for it.

Maybe that, then, is what we're all preparing ourselves for: One final,
forced act of bravery in an adventurous lifetime quietly pursued by
fear.

[JohnRich 4]

Good stuff!