May you live all the days of your life.
Colonel Atwit
Recently my wife and I were driving innocently along a city street when a commercial panel van stopped in front of us at a red light. Obviously this was not the most momentous event in itself, but I noticed that the van had painted on the back in large letters,
FEAR DOESN’T KEEP YOU FROM DYING. FEAR KEEPS YOU FROM LIVING.
My first thought (and possibly yours): “Hey, that’s cool. We shouldn’t fear fear.” I pointed it out to my wife.
I imagined the business owner being inspired by the saying. Perhaps the sentiment motivated her as she founded the business and guided it toward success. Maybe her business cards feature the aphorism, which she hands to prospective customers who say, “hey, I like that.” The slogan helps her form bonds.
I also imagine her purchasing her first business van and hiring a painter to put the maxim in large letters on the back. The painter probably said, “righteous, my dude.” (That is how I suppose commercial van painters talk, but I am open to correction.) The saying is certainly attention getting, but I struggle to recall what the business was. In that sense, it was a marketing failure.
The light changed, and we drove on. Still, being who I am, I continued to contemplate the saying. I later looked it up, and it is similar to a quote from the Egyptian author and Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz: “Fear doesn't prevent death. It prevents life.” (I have also seen it attributed to Buddha, but that seems spurious. He certainly never owned a van.)
As I thought about it more, though, and with all due respect to Mahfouz (or his translator, as it were), I realized the first half of the van’s bit-o’-wisdom (and Mahfouz’s), is all wrong. The second half is a little more nuanced but is also wrong on its face.
Let’s be up front here. Fear has a purpose — an evolutionary purpose — and that very purpose is, in fact, to prevent harm and even death.
Yup. That is what fear does. If a hero rushes into a burning building to rescue a kitten, we say that person overcame their fear to perform that selfless act. If that hero dies as result of the rescue attempt, we can easily see how fear, properly heeded, could have prevented that outcome. Therefore, fear can preserve one’s life.
To be sure, I am not advocating that we all give into our fears any more than I would argue we should give into our anxieties and worries. In fact, I have written on this very topic.
Fear, like worry, can be overdone and can be our undoing, certainly, but what I am suggesting is that our fears need to be balanced with reality. The hero who risks all to rescue a kitten either does not fully grasp the danger or values a kitten’s life over their own.
Whatever the case, heeding their natural fear of the burning building and the harm it could do would have preserved the life of the would-be hero who is free then to go on and perhaps rescue a different kitten from a less perilous situation, such as annoying people by appearing in too many adorable Instagram photos.
As for the second half of the saying — that “fear keeps you from living” or as Mahfouz puts it “prevents life” — well, yes and no. On the one hand, as we have seen, fear actual preserves life. You presumably wouldn’t step in front of a moving panel van because of your fear of being squashed. Right?
But of course by “living” and “life” both the van and Mahfouz mean “experiencing the fullness of one’s existence.” There is a similar use of the term “life” in a quote from my good buddy Jonathan Swift (we have never met) that makes the rounds of inspirational posters and whatnot. My wife, perhaps in an effort to taunt me, even came home with a refrigerator magnet with the quote:
May you live all the days of your life.
This sounds great, right? Again, the supposed meaning is to live life to the fullest. Except that Swift originated the statement in his Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, a series of dialogues featuring fictional members of the “most polite” set in English society. Anyone who knows anything about Swift and his satiric ways can guess by the sardonic title of his work that these dialogues will be designed to mock his subjects.
Indeed the lengthy dialogues are relentlessly clever, insufferably witty, and utterly vapid. The quote from my fridge magnet — “May you live all your days of your life” — is no exception. It occurs as a toast by Colonel Atwit to Miss Notable (the names are a clear hint) and is an example of the empty-headed speech of the fashionable set. After all, whether there be one million, one thousand, or just one day left, how can you not live all the days of your life? For Swift, this line taken literally (as with many others in Ingenious Conversation) is a big duh.
It is perhaps Swift’s vengeance or maybe curse that the quote has been reproduced without apparent irony on countless inspirational consumer items, such as fanny packs, stress balls, and that damn magnet. By the way, notice how Swift ruins everything? I love him for it.
Which brings us right back to the words on the panel van: “Fear doesn’t keep you from dying. Fear keeps you from living.” I hope I have successfully established that the first part is flat-out wrong. If not, let me reiterate. Fear keeps you from dying. It does a lot of other things too, good and bad, but life preservation is its main purpose. Capisce?
The second part of the van’s claim is only true if we take “living” to mean living well or living fully, which is not really all that profound. On it’s surface, it is pretty silly.
To be sure, I get the spirit of what the van is trying to tell us. Fear can hinder our full enjoyment of life. And I agree wholeheartedly. Still, I am bothered by not just the imprecision of its pronouncements but by the van’s negligence. It is reckless, and no one wants to see a reckless van careening down our streets!
The moral of all this? Well, there are several. First, develop a healthy understanding of and relationship with fear. Do not allow fear to debilitate you any more than you allow fearlessness to endanger you. Great leaders curate fear and risk.
Second, words matter, and while a saying on the back of a van does not warrant the scrutiny I have indulged in, someone actual paid someone to paint that saying, and someone actually painted it. If you are going to put that much into a saying on the back of your van, choose more wisely.
Third, while rear doors can be compelling and may seem authoritative, don’t trust everything you read on the back of a van.
Now, go forth and live your life (whatever that means).
How well do you manage fear and anxiety? How healthy is your relationship with fear?
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