Fear wants to know. What happens when we stop trying to solve everything?
There is so much to be afraid of — or is there?
I feel myself tremendously impacted by the state of the world. Just when you think one war is over, a new one starts.
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We were sitting in church on Sunday. This particular church has the feeling that it could hold any religion or spirituality. Michelle, the minister there, holds that principle wonderfully. She is a breath of fresh air.
It’s not unusual for her to encourage the congregation to imagine their faith without the church.
What is your relationship with a higher power when everything else is stripped away she would ask?
I love this question because it challenges us to look beyond the structures, institutions, and people we might feel we need in order to access something bigger than ourselves.
I think because this relationship with life and mystery is so real for her, so alive, she is able to say it very simply.
So when she began her sermon, and the war with Iran had recently started, she said.
“I don’t know what to say about it. But my heart goes out to the people.”
What a beautiful position in a world full of opinions.
I don’t know. And I deeply care.
I found that very comforting.
This whole week I’ve tried to stay in that place of I don’t know.
Because the fear can come on strong sometimes.
And I notice how quickly my mind wants to know.
To feel more in control.
To find certainty.
I can take in too much news.
Too many images.
Too much information.
And the impact is big when fear is in the driver’s seat.
Fear wants to know.
Fear doesn’t want us to stay in uncertainty.
But life has always been uncertain.
Sometimes it can feel more uncertain than others. But the times when it didn’t feel that way didn’t mean it actually wasn’t.
I worked with a young woman recently who told me about the horrific images TikTok was showing her — unasked for.
In some ways I feel lucky to belong to a generation that is slightly behind all of this. I’m way behind on social media. And that also feels like a blessing.
But for many younger people these platforms have become places where a sense of safety and belonging is built.
This person told me she wouldn’t know what to do without TikTok.
What’s strange to me is that we know we are exposed to more than we can handle — and still we reach for the content.
It’s easy to become out of touch with the fear itself and instead move into chronic problem-solving mode.
Especially when the world feels fragile and volatile.
So I wanted to write about fear this week.
And about working with this problem-solver in us — not against it.
Without seeking a perfect existence, the question I find myself asking is this:
What is the right level of fear to experience?
And how do I know when I’ve moved outside that bracket?
Loch Kelly offers a powerful invitation.
He asks:
What’s here when there is no problem to solve?
Or perhaps more simply:
What if there is no problem right now?
Often something subtle happens when we ask this.
There is a little more space.
The breath becomes easier.
The chest may open slightly.
Even if you get a moment of this, it’s gold.
Because you can almost bank on the fact that your system will clench up again.
But the more references we have to this non-problem-solving state, the more capable we become of addressing the problems that are actually in our power to solve.
It’s a strange irony.
Fear often pushes us away from constructive action.
When its grip is strong, we lose what Michael Meade calls our poetic relationship with life.
The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa once said that we live like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.
And when fear is active, the mind begins running its familiar loops.
What is going wrong.
What might go wrong.
How to fix it.
Judging.
Obsessing.
Figuring things out.
Have you noticed how many moments of the day are spent trying to figure something out?
Even when nothing actually needs solving.
If I pause randomly during the day and ask myself what is happening inside right now, I often find something subtle.
Not exactly agitation.
But a slightly edgy feeling.
A kind of background sense that something around the corner could go wrong.
And when we look closely, much of it revolves around a deep apprehension of loss.
Loss of the body.
Loss of people we love.
Loss of belonging, respect, or identity.
Somewhere deep down we know that everything changes.
And something in us tightens in response.
From a neuroscience perspective this tendency makes sense.
The limbic system evolved to scan for danger.
It’s part of what psychologists call the negativity bias.
If you have one hundred encounters with dogs and ninety-nine are friendly but one bites you, you remember the bite.
Fear, in this sense, is nature’s protector.
The challenge is not that we have fear.
The challenge is that sometimes the fear response gets jammed.
Instead of responding to real threats, the alarm system begins firing across many areas of our lives.
Fear takes root in the tissues.
In our thoughts.
In our emotional patterns.
In our behaviours.
And when we are fully inside that loop we enter what Tara Brach calls a kind of trance of fear.
Inside that trance we lose access to some of our capacity.
Sometimes the body itself becomes part of the defence.
A bundle of tense muscles.
The mind starts figuring things out.
Then worrying.
Then more details follow.
Thoughts keep the emotion going.
Whereas emotions in the body often move through much more quickly if we let them.
But, what if we didn’t have a problem with the problem?
What would it be like if the difficulties we feel so intensely under our skin were not actually as catastrophic as they seem?
What if the need to solve them moved into a more creative space?
The stakes are still there.
Life still matters.
But the urgency softens.
There is more space.
And maybe, if you did nothing at all for a moment, that might also be okay too.
Crazy idea, right?
Because often there is a part of us that will downright refuse.
If things became that spacious, it might feel like giving up.
Like weakness.
Like something dangerous might happen.
I once worked with someone who said to me:
“Standing still would feel like going backwards.”
But slowing down has its own intelligence.
Slowing down comes with an echo.
Whatever we have been doing — over days, weeks, months, or years — begins to catch up with us.
The reverberations move through us.
There’s really no other way.
When we begin to contact these feelings directly, we often discover something surprising.
Fear.
Fear that has us clenched in ways that once helped us manage what was unmanageable.
To meet fear directly can feel like a small death to the personality.
Because in those moments we go against the default operating procedures that have been practiced for so long.
And yet there is something exhilarating in this too.
We get to do something different.
Tara Brach describes this as attending and befriending.
Listening to the fear.
Feeling it directly in the body.
And perhaps sensing the life that sits underneath all the problem solving.
At the heart of all this there may be a deeper question.
Can I really be who I am?
Michael Meade speaks about this as a poetic grasp of our lives.
Beyond the survival instinct there is also something creative within us.
Certain things light us up more than others.
Those are often the very things that put us back on our path.
To follow that nature asks us to loosen our grip on the identities we built in the past.
If we truly believe there is a problem right now, what impact does that belief have on our body and mind?
You might pause for a moment and check.
Right now, is there actually a problem that needs solving?
Or is there simply breath, a body sitting here, and a mind that has become very skilled at imagining the next thing that could go wrong?
Sometimes the more subtle problems carry the greatest weight.
It shows up as stress.
Tightness.
A narrowing of our vision.
And in that tightening we lose contact with what might already be here —
support,
possibility,
even creativity.
Things that may have been present all along.
Waiting for a little more space.