關於愛，我是個小學生。

What is being afraid? It is an old feeling of sensational perception, which blended itself with other emotions to stay with us amid daily errands to be taken care of. It is a feeling of utmost repugnance, intense dislike, and deep agitation to evade danger instinctively, or some emotional warning to refrain from doing something malign to the grand purpose of living. Maybe it is the mirror symmetry of being peaceful. As far as human history and any civilization of any culture is concerned, it seems apparently that neither groups nor individuals manage to devise mechanism to survive without getting rid of such feeling, like the Devil. The feeling that the whole world pushes her elbow against still remains, no matter how hard we give it a push, how fast we try to turn around and flee away from it. It haunts within us in a dormant way and creeps out to devour us off once we forget to watch out the padlock hung on its cage. We live to against it, or to be more precisely, we live subject to it. Some even become slaves of it and never dare to claim their justice over liberation that they deserve.

But what are we afraid of exactly? Death? Afterlife, or, to be more candid, Afterdeath? Laid off? Hunger? Obesity? Unsecureness? Loneliness? Quarrels? Fights? Isolation? Nowhere to reside? Or even a few tiny freckles? Why do we dislike these, say, phenomenon happening around us every day? That has been an interesting issue to ponder since human activities were initiated. I believe the perception of fear or even the conception of such feeling is rooted in our brains, installed as a part of our ‘talents’ to experience the world, and we are born to beware to regard it as hateful and nasty. It is well considered as contradiction to survival. I would rather say it is considered as contradiction to our concept of beauty, the instinct to pursue the perfect state of being beautiful.

Edgar Allan Poe once divided human brains into three obvious distinctions: pure intellect, taste, and moral sense, where taste is the recognition to distinguish beauty from ugliness; pure intellect organizes the rules and logic to build the formula to apply to make such distinguishment, while moral senses are the results or outputs of contemplation and interaction of said other two. Beauty is divine, something in distance we still are unable to attain, something we desire like the moth to the candle light, something with mere which we could quench our endless thirst, yet we humans failed to defend her title, her crystal spring-like perennial existence, too weak to justify beauty in the fight against ugliness, the sins. ‘It is no mere appreciation of beauty before us,’ said Allan Poe, ‘but a wild effort reach the beauty above by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time to attain the portion of that loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone.’ That is to say that we are, during our whole lives, making so hard an effort to acquire the beauty, and that’s why we humans are IMMORTAL to other animals and MORTAL just because of our unapproachability to beauty. We are born to be immortal to prove us to be mortal during a process of pursuing beauty in, which is also one of the saddest parts, our limited lifetime. Is it a tragic event to be revealed as an ironic piece of joke?

The most terrible part of such helplessness lies not in the unamendable predetermination, rather in our blindness to such vision, indifference to such imminent danger. We have the ability of feeling scared, but very few of us ever occur to this feeling when coming up with the sorrowful condition of ambiguity in life. Along with the frustration we ought to, and that’s another liability we are born to bear, find a solution to make all these reasonable, to find the solution honestly, not to sophisticate or invent one as a placebo to caress falsely our ever existing trauma. Annika Sorenstein, one of the greatest golfer of all times, was once afraid of water hazards in front of some par 3 holes. She could never be sure how to pick the right club as well as the fine trajectory to have the little white ball pinned on the green near the flag. To overcome such perplexing horrors of hesitation, she stated some words on her cap to remind her every time on the course timely: ‘Face the fear!’ This is perhaps what we should emulate as a role model facing such a huge hurdle in front of our vast life green. Face it, and work it out.

Fortunately, I did find an inbound way through the cul-de-sac. Well, a Shepherd showed me.