LOOKIN’ AROUND by Syd Iwan Fear is a terrible thing. Nevertheless, we are all somewhat afraid of various things and have to live with it. On the other hand, the fears of other people provide excellent opportunities for teasing if we don’t have them ourselves. Just the other day, in fact, I drew wife Corinne’s attention to a want ad in the paper. A company was looking for people to make repairs on those tall towers you see dotting the landscape. Corinne said it looked like a wonderful opportunity if they didn’t want her to climb up over three steps. That is about her limit on a stepladder with only one or two steps being preferable. Neither did my frau appreciate the photo I left on the computer that showed Tom Cruise sitting nonchalantly and barefoot on a tiny platform atop the world’s tallest building in Dubai which is an Arab city on the Persian Gulf. Tom was smiling, and his perch was a two-foot square railing on a slender tower on top of the building. He was over a half-mile high. You could see other really tall buildings way below him. That was even a bit extreme for me, and I’ll leave that sort of thing to someone else. Looking at the picture didn’t make my palms sweat or anything, but that doesn’t mean I am all eager to try such a stunt myself. I have climbed a local water tower once to get a photo of Myrt’s auction sale. I got a nifty picture. In that experience, however, I learned that it is okay to look down from a goodly height but not to look up. If puffy clouds are floating over, you will feel that they are standing still and the tower you are on is falling over backwards. Nasty! Didn’t care for it. It didn’t give me vertigo or make me unable to climb back down, but I still didn’t look up again until I was again safely on solid ground. Fortunately, I don’t seem to have any paralyzing fears that I know of. I hate rattlesnakes, of course, but that doesn’t prevent me from grabbing a hoe or any handy weapon and doing them in. On occasion I have killed them with rocks for lack of anything better. This isn’t ideal but will do in a pinch. Bats are yucky too, but those are hard to do anything about. They’re on the wing, fast, and hard to catch up with. I just avoid those suckers and hope they go away. I noticed while in the military that some guys faint if given a shot. Since the military is big on shots and is going to give them come hell or high water, you maybe shouldn’t join up if you can’t handle it. Other people faint at the sight of blood. This is hard for someone like me to understand since I grew up cleaning chickens and don’t give blood a second thought. I don’t know how I would handle bloody accidents that ambulance people have to deal with, but I probably wouldn’t faint or get ill anyway. Speed can make people nervous. I have noticed my driving on country roads can give certain passengers a bad case of white knuckles. I slow down when I see this happening. I always chuckled at my dad who would occasionally put on imaginary brakes from the passenger seat when I was driving. What made it all the more amusing was that he himself drove really fast, and I usually wasn’t driving any faster than he would down the same roads. It makes some difference, apparently, if you’re the one driving or if someone else is. I found that to be true of myself when I was teaching a couple of foster kids to drive. Sometimes I got fidgety. It works both ways. Ataxophobia is the fear of disorder or untidiness. I don’t seem to have that. Ask my wife. Actually, I like disorder less than untidiness, but neither one upsets me unduly. Electrophobia is the fear of electricity. When I go to fix an outlet or an electrical fixture, I do often proceed with more caution than is strictly required. If you mess up there, you could be dead. Claustrophobia is another thing I have to deal with. You would never catch me in the huge crowd of merrymakers in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Way too many people in too small a space. Mountains and trees don’t do much for me either since they make me feel unnecessarily confined. The wide open spaces of the prairie are a lot easier for me to deal with although those can bother some people too. God tells us many times in the Bible to be strong and courageous. He says we can do that because he is with us and will see us through. I do believe that and try to apply it, but that doesn’t mean we need to take foolish unnecessary chances. Corinne thinks climbing too high on tall ladders is taking foolish unnecessary chances, and I think the same of being in crowds. Like I said, we all have certain fears we have to deal with. Good luck with yours. All we can do is keep on trying.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 12:26:27 +0000
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