Ok, storytime...

When I was 17, I liked to climb up onto the roof of my house and walk around up there. One day, I looked over the edge and thought about jumping off. I sat down at the edge of the roof, with my feet dangling over the side. I tried to push myself off a little and found that I couldn't. My arms just wouldn't let myself do it. The ground looked very far away and the fear was overwhelming.

I climbed back down to the ground to check out the jump from a different angle. My roof was peaked, so jumping from the edge was only like a seven foot drop. If I jumped up from the ground, I could just touch the bottom of the roof. I figured that I oughta be able to take a seven foot drop without hurting myself. I climbed back up on the roof and sat back down on the edge. I prepared to jump. I couldn't do it. 'Ok,' I thought to myself, 'on three. One... two... three.' Nope. My arms wouldn't budge. I must've sat up there for ten minutes. Finally, I managed to repress my deep lower-brain impulses long enough to make the leap.

I hit the ground hard. Harder then expected. But I stood up. I was fine.

...Or so I thought.

Eventually, it turned out I had given myself a hernia jumping off the roof. In case you don't know, the typical hernia is a tear in your abdominal wall -- the thing that holds your guts in. So there was this spot, a little above and to the right of my crotch, where I would sometimes get this bulge when food was passing through that part of my intestines. I would apply pressure to it with my hand and it would go back down. It didn't hurt, but it was of course uncomfortable.

Hernias never heal on their own, they can only be fixed through surgery. Now, for various reasons, I didn't get the hernia repaired until a few days ago (December 2nd).

I'm really impressed with the surgery. They made a small incision, placed a mesh over the torn area, and then closed me up. As I type this, my abdominal wall, having detected the presence of the mesh, is sending out fibrous tissue, naturally reinforcing the mesh like steel placed in a concrete wall. Soon, I will be good as new. It's only been 5 days since the surgery, and I've just about fully recovered. In a few days it will be as though nothing ever happened.

It's truly amazing to me to think that I did something as stupid as jumping off my roof and emerged from it completely, 100% undamaged. It's got me thinking: In today's age of modern technology, fear is rapidly losing it's value. Once upon a time it prevented us from doing stupid shit and hurting ourselves, but now with modern technology, it takes a whole lot of stupidity to do any real, lasting damage.

I jumped off the roof just a few days after I had finished reading Dune, the famous novel by Frank Herbert. One of the most important pieces of the book is the "Litany against fear," which goes like this:

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

When faced with scary circumstances certain characters in the book repeat that litany to themselves over and over in order to stay calm.

I agree the sentiment. Fear causes people to behave irrationally and sometimes even dangerously. What utility it once held in diminishing rapidly. In the future, I am going to work at repressing my instinctive fear in an effort to evaluate situations with a more objective eye. I encourage others to do the same.

If you have faith, then there is no place for fear. We cannot have both fear and faith. On any day faith is good than fear. So, we must choose faith over fear. So fear is not good, but faith is.

fear is not a good thing. It may be a threat to our success. Once you have fear on a certain thing, then you would think not to do it. Sometimes if oppotunity comes and we think of the consequences, most of the opinions we have in our mind are negative and we then decide not to do it. What if that opportunity is the key for your success, then you will not be able to achieve success and you will start on blaming on yourself why you quit?, why you didn't do it? Oh man, is that a good thing to have fear in your hearts? Fear for me is just a threat, a hindrance for our success.