Fear Taught Me To Be Goofy

It is quite possible that Mickey’s pal, Goofy, may have given me an early education in controlling my Fear.

The memory is still very vivid.

 I was six, maybe seven. I remember laying in the bed, facing the window– in the dark, in the night. The wind was screaming and pushing against the side of the house. Thunder was bursting like cannon fire and lighting flashed.  Fatal thoughts starting to creep into my brain.  Outside, the wind would press harder, roar louder.

I knew what that could mean. I knew what tornados could do. They could destroy. They could kill! Nature, in all its nastiness, could take my little body with its big head and matted hair and suck me through the glass and wood and out into the rain and trees and up into the sky. And then I’d be gone, vanished into some wet dark negative void!

I knew I couldn’t move; it was too risky. The air around me would sense the twitching and then attack. I waited, gritting my teeth. Maybe my parents would come, they could tell me what to do, they could help me survive.  Maybe the storm would pass, and fate would favor me one more day. Or maybe there would be no happy end…

At that time, cable TV was still a luxury not many people I knew had. Friends or grandparents were my bastions of hours of entertaining programming. Often, I would find a cable channel that would show blocks of old Goofy and Mickey Mouse shorts.  Goofy was the pinnacle of slapstick humor; a determined, yet doltish everyman. And the situations he found himself in, as well as how he solved them were absurd in a classic comic sense.

And so iconic to Goofy, along with his laugh, was his howling scream. It was such a distinct and wild reaction. So that night as I lay frozen in bed, I recalled the absurdity of his reaction to danger—a goofy high-pitched wail. When the monstrous thunderstorm shook the house and lightning flash, I imagined myself shooting up in the air in fright and howling like Goofy.

A chuckle escaped my throat as I pictured this. Quickly, the anxiety of being destroyed by the outside forces deflated.

The storm passed, and soon after sleep came to me.

 My little memory illustrated this to me:   So often we appeal to Fear, and so readily too. The conversation about fear and how to deal with it is such a dense one. Just as often we discuss how much we should fear, and about what we should fear, and which fears are real and serious, or which are irrational and unwarranted. So much of discussions around situations can begin by determining to what degree should we be concerned; how much should we fear? How much of a problem is this? What will it or can it do?  And the discussion has gone on for so long (while writing this I thought of Aristotle’s passage on fear in his theories on rhetoric).

Reactions to fear matter.  I would find it fair to say that what we do in response to fear carries greater weight than the fear itself more often than not.  Fear only exists in a state of anticipation; The great What if’sand When’s. If a storm comes, or a disaster happens, or pandemics, or when will violence or war or hate stop.

 That night I discovered the strange relationship between what we tremble at and what we laugh at. The underpinning as to why so many times we have unexpectedly laughed at someone’s rage or something that should startle us or shocks us – even a degree of violence – can cause a particular person on a particular day to erupt in laughter. In that perversion is there a weapon to defeat Fear?

Does our capacity to flip the tone of the terrible helps us confront Fear? When is it healthy, and when is it not? It seems like a useful step at the least. And how do we discuss or fears when how we respond to our fears account so much for an outcome of a situation?

I am not fearless; very few can be I think. We are living in troubling times; fear can grip us. Do I dare to see the tinge of goofiness within the reality of Fear (along with a dose of rationality), to  help me face the challenges facing me ? Is it already absurd to act – to be brave – in lieu of pain or death? There ae many who have defied Fear.  Fear many never be eradicated, but I believe it can become more absurd in its relationship to us.  Be Goofy.