NOTHING TO FEAR AT ALL

I NEVER knew I could feel so at peace sitting in a gryke, with my face to the wind and my back to a dolmen. A gryke is a crevice in a limestone floor and a dolmen is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of three or more upright stones supporting a large flat horizontal capstone (table). Most date from the early Neolithic period (4000 to 3000 BCE).
This was not my first time visiting the Burren, an area of limestone rock covering awesome mountains and gentle valleys with meandering streams. Only this time around, I could hear the echoes of silence as it was a bank holiday and there were hardly any tourists.

I found myself humbled by the visual delights of this unspoilt corner of Ireland and intrigued by the ancient mysteries. I wondered about the civilisations that lived there aeons ago. I could imagine men of yore hunting wolves and bears and could hear the sounds and feel the atmosphere of past civilisations.

I wondered about their daily lives, and their thoughts, feelings, joys and fears. From what I had read, they were afraid of the unknown, afraid of the Greater Being, afraid of living and afraid of dying. Most of them hardly lived beyond 40 because of the harsh landscape.
Like most people, I was brought up on a diet of ghosts, spirits and superstitions which were fodder to a child's fertile mind. Horror movies and playing hide and seek in dark places exacerbated the fear. But at the Burren I was amazed that I could be so close to the Poulnabrone Dolmen which once housed the bones of a newborn baby, six juveniles and 16 to 22 adults, and not feel afraid. Poulnabrone literally means "the hole of the sorrows".

Most people are afraid of something or the other. We are afraid of what others will think of us or what we do. We are afraid of losing friends if we dare to be different and losing face, especially if someone has tarred our reputation.

If we think about the things we have done, we will realise that there will always be two opinions for all our actions. The same act will be condemned by some, while others will applaud.

We are afraid of change. If you watch children at play, you can see them switching roles and taking on challenges. As we grow older we become more comfortable with certain surroundings. We sit on the same bench, drink from the same cup and we hobble along instead of walking with a sprint.

We have become great friends with familiarity and predictability has become our security blanket. It takes the strength of many horses combined to drag us out of the arena we call routine.

We are afraid of failure. Sometimes, we think that something will not work out even before it has begun. The haunting reality of failure is very real and no respecter of men. Children who have been put down by significant adults and told that they will not measure up to anything, struggle with this.

The perfectionist who craves for an orderly world struggles with this. The achiever who is not pacified by his last success also struggles with this.

We are afraid of losing the people that we love. We are afraid that if we set boundaries and standards for our teenage children, they will leave home, never to return. We are afraid if our children are not filial, they will abandon us when we are old. We are afraid that the person whom we love will leave us to be alone again.

Fear can also be the result of worrying. We worry when we do not know what will happen next. Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address that "there is nothing to fear but fear itself". This famous quote referred to the fact that uninformed fears and irrational panic can turn a manageable situation into a dangerous crisis.

If we analyse the times when we were worried or fearful, we can safely say that some of the most dreaded things never really came to past.