Fear is both one of the most essential and one of the most crippling things that humans experience. While it serves as a survival mechanism, it also can blur our sense of what is or isn't an immediate threat.

Either way, fear is most clearly contemplated in its absence, because a state of fear makes it much more difficult to stay "conscious." The heart starts racing, fight or flight kicks in, and while fear is clearly appropriate in some situations, the body doesn't always differentiate from a false alarm.

Case in point. Recently I was cruising along a trail I've hiked dozens of times. It's only a half-hour loop, and although not densely populated in the immediate vicinity, at one end you could throw a rock and hit a house. Suburbia is just a couple blocks away. At the deepest point in the forest, there's a waterfall where I often pause for a moment of reflection, but on this day there was a posted sign announcing that bear cubs had been spotted in the area.

Anyone who knows anything about bear cubs knows that when there are cubs, mama bear isn't far behind. I could feel my body tighten up, my heart rate accelerate, all because of... a sign! Words on a paper! An idea was totally altering my physiology and sending my autonomic nervous system into overdrive. Even now, writing about it, I can feel physical shifts as I remember the feelings of that moment. (OK, so I'm highly suggestible. This is why I never saw The Blair Witch Project.)

This was the exact same response my body had had a few weeks earlier on another hike, also quite near suburbia, when I saw two very large coyotes. At that time the animals were between me and the park entrance, so I had to go deeper into the park and come around the long way to try to avoid meeting them. (Although it's rare, coyotes have been known to attack women.) Of course, being animals, these two specimens probably picked up my scent but were preoccupied with smaller, tastier prey.

In both of these situations I managed to stay reasonably present and note that the birds kept obliviously twittering, clearly not fearful at all. I could argue that they are able to get away from most danger much more quickly than I, but in the moment, their happy chirps somehow calmed me; I did some deep breathing, focused on the details of tree bark, and kept moving, albeit much more quickly than before.

I suppose if I'd been attacked by one of these animals it would justify my feelings of fear, but since I escaped unscathed, it made me think about how much fear can determine life experience.

Years ago I interviewed Shirley MacLaine about her pilgrimage along Spain's El Camino Santiago, and asked her, hadn't she ever been uneasy walking alone through the mountains of Spain? The actress dismissed my question with total scorn. "That's your trip," she said. I guess she was right.

Photo by Marya