Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us
“Maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. Maybe then we’d spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face; the silent build up of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. Just as the most nuance stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest.”
A semi-related quote by Steven Callahan, author of Adrift:
“Deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed — food, shelter, clothing, and companionship — yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goods. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness.”
