The Oxford Dictionary describes fear as:

An unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm;

A feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety of someone;

The likelihood of something unwelcome happening

but also

A mixed feeling of dread and reverence.

The Urban Dictionary says it is:

an emotion which tends to take over your mind causing negative thinking, anger, and even more fear;

Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

and

Fear is the only thing in your way from achieving your goals.

These days I like to call the Black Death or Saving Grace, for two reasons. One being fear is False Evidence Appearing Real, meaning whatever you are afraid of you can overcome but your own mind has tricked and trapped you into thinking you cannot. Two; sometimes we fear things with good reasons to for example walking alone at night, it is dangerous and this has been proven time and time again. So being weary of walking alone at night causes you to take the appropriate measures to secure yourself if you need to move around at night. Fear is an issue like any that has two faces to it.

This emotion can elicit a “rush” from you or terrorize you sometimes even paralyze you. The reason for this comes down to one thing the context; how we perceive a situation has an immense bearing on whether we react with immense excitement or numbing fear.

You live a life where you know where what goes, what happens when, who comes when, who goes when etc. You’ve you reached a plateau in your life where you can sit comfortably and once one is in a situation like this they do not like to be shaken or even poked, no sort of discomfort is appreciated. Now nothing shakes someones foundation more than uncertainty however small and with it comes fear, it’s like having the lights right in front of you being shut off when ever you take or try to take a step forward. However that’s all life really is lots of uncertainty and a series of fortunate and unfortunate events orchestrated by decisions you’ve made or external factors and your the explorer trying to trek your way through it. We always think of uncertainty as an obstacle that we must go over, go through or get around of but we can also see it as a curtain. A curtain that when pulled back holds either an amazing result or nothing much because what your doing behind the scenes is what eventually appears on the scene, never forget that.

 That which you dread may be that, that frees you
It may make you cringe
You may make you cry 
You may make you lose 
But hopefully you won't die

"Oh the worlds a stage" upon which we perform
A scene upon which our stories are told
There are those that all see and those that they don't
You never know your next scene or next story to tell 
Next adventure or tragedy to befall you 
Next next or next next next
And all in all as Dory say "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming" 

As a wrote this article I decided to do some research on fear, its triggers and what it entails as I did this I stumbled upon this simple but interesting answer on Quora: http://We all have our comfort zones. This plateau may occur when we’ve become good at our jobs and can show off a skill or complete a task without thinking too much about the process. We also learn society’s rules and regulations early in our formative years, and become confident that this knowledge is valid each day. This allows us to get to work, buy groceries, and cross the road without getting shot in the face. Mostly. Learning new tasks requires time and effort that we’d prefer to spend impressing people with what we already know, or going about our business, following rules that we’ve already learned to obey. We aren’t really interested in the government suddenly deciding to change which side of the road we drive on. That’s going to take massive amount of re-education, and a lot of people are going to get shot in the face. Some people don’t like change because they are too lazy, too fearful, under educated, or have physical or mental problems that make learning new tasks and rules difficult. People generally want to follow the path of least resistance. Luckily there are enough innovators and free-thinkers among the sheep who spice things up for the rest of us, and hopefully one of them will make the rest of us a bulletproof face-shield.

You can interpret that however you like but what I see is learning new things, change, anything we want to do but are not sure about requires us to rewire ourselves and go back to the drawing board sometimes needing us to unlearn some of the skills we’ve mastered in order for us to tackle this new wave that’s about to hit us. We just don’t want to do that and just thinking about it causes us to get afraid then the uncertainty of the whole situation looms over us, we consider all the ways it could go wrong and the two ways it could go right if we tried. In short we turn into a hot mess and want others to take the risks for us because . However, when faced with this looming fear of the unknown we need to embrace how uncertain we feel about it and only then can find a way to push through that curtain and onto the other side of our fears.

Though finding “what is to be done next” is hard, breathe, step back and survey the situation as you do this a window will open and you will see it and jump through. Don’t panic or lose your head just breath and enter the murky waters riddled with fear however you feel comfortable doing so, because and it grounds you in a skewed kind of way.

Kahumuzah