What is the worst thing in the world?
I can name you a number of things which must come close, but the answer to the question has changed as I've grown older.
When I was a child, it was the though of losing Skippy, the big female cat who made the ordinary pussy with nine lives look like a mere beginner. Skippy had a squillion lives, and so she would never die.
When I was a teenager it was spiders, chemistry lessons, and the thought of kissing someone badly.
In recent years, it has been: the thought of having to face life without ever hearing from a particular person again and, once I had relinquished her, the thought of ever hearing from her again. Later still, the prospect of unemployment was the worst thing I could think of.
At some stage or other, all of the life-ending catastrophes I listed above have indeed come about - the most recent being a message from the woman from whom I least wanted to hear. Yet the world didn't cease to turn.
I ask, then, what purpose such fears serve? How many times am I to be liberated upon their realisation before it occurs to me that I am repeatedly falling a thousand feet off a cliff, only to make a soft landing every time? I don't know of anyone who isn't bound tightly to their fears; to the thought of the worst-case scenario unfolding.
Many of our behaviours are designed to hold off or lessen the effect of The Worst Thing In The World, yet when it comes around it is often anything but. We still remain yoked to our miserable, small-time frighteners, though - and there's no doubt that it's in the interests of any number of people that we remain so - but being able to cast them off, once and for all, is the key to liberation.
We can, in general, only shed them by experiencing them, and appreciating that their vastly-inflated something is little more than nothing.
