I woke up this morning in a contemplative mood, and the thing I am contemplating is the paradox of fear.

Fear is probably the keenest-felt of all human emotions. Neither love nor hatred achieves such a sense of absolute immediacy, and with good biological reason: fear keeps us alive. Our ancestors survived long enough to evolve into us because they took counsel of their fears. You are reading this now instead of occupying a few cubic feet within a coffin, or a few cubic inches within an urn, because the region of your brain which periodically causes you to feel afraid has by doing so, also prevented you from dying prematurely on countless thousands of occasions. In a less dramatic sense, you have probably gone farther in your life than you might have, had not fears of a less visceral variety dictated a more sober course of action than you actually wanted to take. The jobs we do, the relationships we enter into and maintain -- or don't -- and the daily lives we lead, down to very fine particulars, are all dictated to some extent by generalized fears which prevent us from behaving stupidly or destructively. To be successful in modern life, one must have a healthy and well-developed sense of fear, and if our fears today are not the fears of our ancestors 300 or even 30,000 years ago, well, the tent of fear is a large one. We may not have to worry much about being eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore, but modern life can still devour us easily enough, albeit in different ways.

Viewed through this lens, fear, like pain, is a useful necessity. But in modern life, fear is also a strangely inhibiting and dangerous thing. It can be dangerous to us physically, and it can most definitely be dangerous to us mentally and spiritually.

As I said above, fear at its core is a very simple thing. It's a sudden rush of chemicals which punish risky behavior with negative emotion while rewarding us with enough adrenaline to escape sudden danger. But fear, like everything else, has evolved with time and become complex. It has spawned children, among whose names are anxiety and dread. Anxiety, by my own personal definition, is fear spread out over time, spread like a film over daily life, so that one is constantly dealing with stress on the body: adrenaline trickles. The heart beats too fast. Concentration is difficult. Temper is short. Sleep comes poorly. As for dread, what is that but a pervasive sense of impending doom? A sense that, metaphorically speaking, the lion in the tall grass is getting closer and closer? One suffers from dread as from a low-grade but chronic ailment: it poisons everything, makes nothing seem worthwhile, inhibits pleasure, contentment, and joy. Indeed, it makes the act of simply being alive a contest of endurance. To exist in a suspended state of dread is to long for escape -- even if it means dying. The irony of this is too obvious to merit much comment, except that there is a deep, foul bitterness in the idea of the thing which keeps us alive making us feel as if life itself is unbearable.

The life we lead nowadays as a species is not the life evolution designed us for. Fear was intended to be a very powerful burst of emotion and sensation which produced a single end: protection of the human who felt it. But in modern, "first world" life we no longer need fear being eaten by bears or poisoned by snakes or clubbed to death by rival tribes. Our glands no longer explode into action and then fall into dormancy. They are awake at almost all times, steadily pumping chemicals into our bloodstream that tax our bodies and make us unhealthy. The matrix we have built, civilization, has elminated one set of well-defined fears but replaced them with a much larger, much less dramatic set of fears which we have proven incapable of managing. Fear of debt. Fear of joblessness. Fear of homelessness. Fear of societal ridicule and alienation. Even fear of old age -- a problem our ancient ancestors didn't have, but probably wanted. The result is a crisis of mental health problems, drug use, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and suicide. But less dramatically, it has led to a different sort of crisis. The fear of living. Of actually being alive.

The fear of living is something I noticed at a relatively young age, when I was also noticing that I had different dreams than those around me. Most kids in my age group had specific desires for what they wanted to be -- firemen, astronauts, etc. As we grew up a little into our teenage years, our ambitions matured and crystalized. You'd hear someone say she or he wanted to be an interior designer, or an environmental lawyer, or go to Wall Street or medical school or what have you. I myself never harbored any of these ambitions. From the time I was ten years old, possibly even younger than that, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create imaginary worlds full of imaginary people which and who would seem more real to the reader than the things and people in their actual lives. I wanted to create things and bring them before the masses. More vaguely, I also wanted to be a part of Hollywood: exactly what part varied from year to year, but the general goal was to be involved in the making of the same type of movies and television shows I myself liked to watch. In the broadest sense, I wanted to entertain people, and, I suppose, gain attention and praise for myself.

Some years later, I found myself, as most later twentysomethings do, in the "real world." It is worth noting here that the phrase "real world" always connotes an atmosphere of unpleasantness, harshness, disappointment, and even menace. The implication is that the life you've led from birth until the age of about 21 - 22 or so was to some degree or other fake; a warm, pleasant illusion cast by loving parents and reasonably forebearing teachers, neighbors and lesser relations. Once in the "real world," however, the spell was broken, as a deep, contented sleep might be broken by a bucket of cold water. Suddenly life, which was aglow with rosy optimism, was now a loveless, comfortless environment in which dreams were quickly and messily put to death, and all sorts of cruel, jarring realities came knocking on the door with knuckles of spiked brass.

The general tenor of the gospel of "the real world" is this: "Childhood is over, kid. Time to put on the big-boy pants. Nobody loves you out here, and your folks can't protect you. This world is full of sharp edges and damned few safe spaces. From this point on, you're on your own, and you've got to bring home the bacon or starve. Put away your dreams like they were Star Wars toys, because from now on its alarm clocks, commutes, water-cooler politics, 1.9 kids and a mortage."

For someone like myself, whose goals were unrealistic from the gitgo, and who had little interest in a conventional life, "the real world" was a horrific experience. I was surprisingly successful at navigating it, but I enjoyed none of the process and was plagued from ages of 23 - 31 with an almost continuous sense of deep unfulfillment. Sometimes this sense was unendurable: I began to experience anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and other physical symptoms of depression including migraine headaches. These things, I realize now, were my body's way of telling me that I was, to quote Orwell, outraging my true nature by harnessing myself to "the real world." I was experiencing a midlife crisis while still a young man, and the crisis was brought about by fear. Not fear of death, but fear that one day I would die without having done those things I was put on Earth to do. Nobody, literally nobody, wants to depart this vale of tears with their music still inside them, and the knowledge that I was chugging steadily toward this grim fate plagued and haunted me.

At the same time, I had a different fear: the fear that if I chucked up my job and went after my dreams of being a novelist and a Hollywood player (of however modest a caliber), I would fail miserably...and be seen to fail, be cataloged as a failure. Whenever I incautiously mentioned my dreams to others, I almost invariably was either laughed at to my face or grimly questioned as to the practical consequences of defeat. I won't say I got no encouragement, but I can say that my e'er-supportive Mom aside, most of the encouragement I got was either tepid and qualified, or came out of love for me rather than a belief that "going for it" was the right thing for me to do.

But the bitterest attacks against me all came from people who, I realize now, were themselves afraid. They were not afraid that I would flop, but rather that I wouldn't. Any success I had at chasing the brass ring would simply touch the open would they nursed within their own souls, the wound left by their own practical, perhaps cowardly, choice not to seek a ring of their own. There is no hater so fiery, so full of energy, so relentlessly vicious and inventive with viciousness, as one who knows that he or she lacked the courage to go for it when it mattered...and must now watch as you possibly succeed where they most definitely failed.

The fear that I was wasting my life and talents had all but paralyzed me, and this paralysis led to greater and greater fear as the months went by. The other fear, that if I did act on my ambitions I would fail in spectacular and humiliating fashion and have to come "crawling back" to my old life in two years time, paralyzed me further. I didn't want to fail, but I really didn't want to be humiliated.

You see what I'm driving at here. The natural, healthy instinct of self-preservation had turned, curdled somehow, and become an inhibiting force in my life. It had trapped me in misery, an act which only increased that misery. A cycle had been created and to break it I would have to overcome my fears. I would have to embrace risk -- the thing fear is designed to avoid. In short, I'd have to pull a kind of George Costanza and do the exact fucking opposite of everything my fear-glands were telling me to do and not to.

If you're reading this, you already know what I did, and the successes (and setbacks) I had a result. I have often likened the period between my choice to quit my profession and chase down all my ambitions, and today, when I am now balancing both "the real world" and my dream life, to a bareknuckle boxing match of infinite duration. There have been times when I was on the ropes. There have been times when I was down, dazed, and listening to the count. There have been moments when I was spitting blood and broken teeth into the bucket while my trainer jammed smelling salts beneath my busted conk. But there have also been moments of tremendous, validating triumph. I won't bore you with a list of accomplishments, any more than I will torment myself with a litany of missed opportunities, near misses and failures, but I will say this: Lawrence Sanders was right when he wrote, "Nobody wins the final decision, but with luck we can pick up a few rounds."

At this point you may be wondering why I placed "Prophecy" in the title of this epistle along with fear and paradox. The answer is that the one leads to the other and to the other still. Fear leads to the paradox that the very thing which was designed to keep us alive kills us spiritually and even physically if we give it too much heed; this paradox leads to prophecy of a self-fulfilling nature. The coward -- and we all have one inside of us -- will always look at someone who took a chance and ended up on his or her ass and say, "I told you that would happen." And indeed the coward did. As the saying goes, the view is good from the cheap seats and the coward always occupies the cheapest seats of all: the peanut gallery. From this inexpensive but lofty vantage, he can see everything, especially negative outcome. But he does not look with the purpose of navigating around those outcomes. He looks with ways of surrendering to them, or worse yet still, avoiding them entirely by demanding that you take no chances at all. He is a gray and timid soul who wants all souls to be gray and timd lest he stand out for what he is. That is his special fear, the fear of the hater, which in this case is the self-hater: that he will be exposed. That his reasons, his arguments, his sober observations and heartfelt warnings will be rightly appraised as his fear of daring, of failure, of climbing down from the gallery and into the arena where the real men and real women fight to see their dreams come true.

Looking back, I can see now that every time in my life when I lost, or deliberately ignored, the line between healthy, reasonable fear and the self-restricting, self-defeating, self-destructive kind preached by my own inner coward and those around me who did not have my interests at heart, I not only disappointed myself, I lost some sense of who I was as a human being. Unhealthy fear is like a fog that makes navigation difficult or even impossible, and triggers an instinct to kill the engines and lower the anchor. But there is no safety in immobility, because there is no safety in "the real world." Life is degrees of risk. The only question you have to ask yourself is which one you wish to take.