The Gift of the Gift of Fear
The unexptected pleasure of swimming in sharky waters
Three years ago, in 2018, just down the road from our summer cottage at Newcomb Beach, a shark fatally bit a swimmer. A few weeks earlier, a man was bitten on the leg, but managed to punch the shark in its gills and swim to shore. The swimmer at our beloved beach, Arthur Medici, was following all the rules, boogie boarding close to the lifeguard in shallow water on a sunny afternoon, but none of that was helpful when the shark lunged at him. He lost blood quickly.
We were not at the beach when it happened. We were swimming at a nearby pond. As the helicopters circled overhead, I knew that the moment we had all been worrying about had come to pass. The shark population here has been growing every year, in large part because the grey seals, which were once hunted for bounty ($5 a nose) are now protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The seals have made a valiant recovery and set up a colony just north of here in Truro. It used to be a thrill to spot one hundreds of yards out. Now, it's not unusual to see a pod of 10 or more seals floating in the waves breaking at the shoreline. The thrill has been replaced with concern.
Like for many others who love swimming this expanse of ocean, the shark fatality sent me into a deep state of sadness. I felt grief for the tragic end to a young man’s life and also for a loss of innocence. I wondered if I would ever again feel the sense of freedom and lightness that the ocean had provided for me.
Joe and I walked to the ocean the next morning. Someone had already made a plaque with Arthur’s name and the dates of his life. He was only 26. There were flowers and rocks painted with hearts and notes to him and his family. We crested the top of the dune and looked out over the expanse of blue. A few hundred yards off shore, in front of the very spot he had been bitten, were three surfers, sitting on their boards waiting for the next set of waves. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for their courage. Their love of the water was clearly greater than their fear of death. When one of them came out of the water, I asked him how he felt about it. I was expecting bravado and he surprised me when he said, “Yeah, of course I’m scared. But I know I will be back in the water at some point. If I don’t get back in today, it’s only going to become harder to overcome my fear.”
I knew, too, that I would want to swim again. I knew that driving to the beach was a far greater risk than diving into the sharky waters. But I didn’t have to do it. It was a luxury. A pleasure I could forgo in favor of safety and certainty. I knew that the sharks have been there all along. While shark’s immediate threat to humans feels recent, in that it’s new in our lifetimes, the sharks themselves aren’t new. They’ve been here for hundreds of millions of years. We are the newcomers.
The Atlantic Shark Conservancy has been tagging sharks off of Cape Cod and they created an app called Sharktivity. You can sign up for alerts and get a ping whenever a shark enters the water near you. I have not downloaded the app. One reason why is that it’s an incomplete data set. Only some 300 sharks are tagged out of an unknown number. Their presence tells us nothing about the absence of others. It’s an alarm that tells you to be cautious but it can’t tell you when to relax. A bit like watching the news.
We walked down to the shoreline, past the row of beach goers who had set up their chairs like audience members waiting for the play to begin. There were no children splashing, no boogie boarders wading out past the break. Ocean as theater. The beach as a spectator sport. We walked past the spectators, out of sight of the lifeguards, to the place where the sandbar ended. I took my clothes off and stood naked facing the waves. I felt vulnerable, like I was offering myself to something much greater than me.
“Fear is a gift,” writes Gavin De Becker in his bestselling book of the same name. De Becker has been investigating fear and violence for four decades. He has appeared on Oprah several times to talk about how fear can keep us safe. Most of us are familiar with the fight or flight response to fear. De Becker says fear also gives us superpowers. When we experience fear, our heart beats faster, our senses are sharp and synchronized. We are firing on all cylinders. “Time is divided into milliseconds,” he says. We become pure instinct, focused intently on what is happening in the here and now. “The great thing about fear,” De Becker says, is that “if we fear something, we can be sure it’s not happening.” By that, he means that, when we truly need it, fear happens to us. I liken it to an orgasm— a sensory and emotional experience that comes to us and, when it happens, it takes over our brains, turning our bodies into pure animal. Logic gives way to instinct. “When the moment we have been fearing comes to pass, we are no longer fearful,” De Becker says. We are in it, alive, alert, sensing what we need to do in the here and now.
“Fear is meant to be brief,” De Becker writes. “If you have fear about something that is not present, that is called anxiety.” Fear is our most urgent messenger of intuition. Anxiety and worry, De Becker says on the other hand, are not only useless, but a drain on our energy and ability to sense. Anxiety and worry intercept the unconscious messages that we are sensing all the time, the ones that can alert us to real threats, not just imagined ones.
There was, of course, a risk going into the water. And the risk had increased every year as the shark population grew. But it had already taken a far greater risk by getting in my car to drive to the beach. Logic would tell me that the risk of going in the water that morning was no different than the risk of going in the day before, nor would the risk be any different tomorrow, or the day after that. The only way to avoid the risk entirely would be to never go in the water again. That was not an option. I love swimming in the ocean far too much to become one of the spectators on the beach.
As I stood facing the water, my heart quickened and I felt like I couldn’t catch a good breath. “It’s not that we don’t want fear,” De Becker writes. “It’s just that we are confused about when fear is warranted and when it is not. Unwarranted fear will always be in response to something you imagine or something you remember. True fear is always based on something you assess in your environment or situation.” There were no sharks in sight. What I was feeling at that moment was not true fear but anxiety. Anxiety, De Becker says, and all of our unwarranted fear is far more dangerous than whatever it is we are worrying about. Stress related disorders like heart disease, depression and suicide kill more Americans than any form of violence and certainly more than all the sharks in the world for eternity. Another way to think about anxiety comes from the German psychoanalyst, Fritz Perls. Perls, along with his wife Laura, coined the term Gestalt therapy to describe their innovative work. Perls said that anxiety is excitement without breath.” I inhaled deeply, bringing my attention to the coolness of the air entering my nostrils and the smell of the salt water and seaweed. I imagined the air filling my lungs and then swirling through me like the waves at my feet. I felt like I was about to participate in an ancient initiation ritual. The word sacred came to me. It occurred to me to do something I had not done before: I asked the ocean permission to enter. I felt tender gratitude as I imagined a resounding yes. I have since learned that this was my intuitive way of taking my attention off of myself and redirecting it to my environment. “ What you fear is rarely what you think you fear,” De Becker writes. “It is what you link to fear.” He says it is a wiser choice to apply imagination to the outcome we do want rather than the one we don’t want.
I took a few more steps, letting the ocean rise up to meet me. And then I dove into the brisk September ocean and stayed under, feeling the weight of the slick sea against my skin, until my lungs burned. I stayed under, opening my eyes to watch my hands scoop water to propel me. I swam under the waves until my lungs begged me for air. I surfaced and looked around. The sun was much higher on the horizon, the spectators down the beach were still waiting, Joe was swimming toward me smiling. The air came into my lungs easily, feeling clean and new. I was very much alive.
FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES
Fear is an emotion we cannot control, nor would we want to. It is what keeps us from becoming prey. It comes to us when we need it. If we go looking for it, or if we hold onto it, thinking that we need it on our shoulder all the time to keep us same, then we are dealing with anxiety. Anxiety is like future tripping with fear. It’s a choice, De Becker and many other researchers say. To reduce our anxiety, the first step is to notice it, approve it, and get curious. Ask yourself what it is you need to know.
Here are a few tips:
Notice the physical sensations of anxiety. Some of them are feelings, others are sensations. They can include: Feeling nervous, restless, or tense, having a sense of doom, increased heart rate, shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, trouble concentrating and sleeping, and feeling insecure.
Observe, without judgement, the physical and emotional feelings. Judging clouds our vision. Observing keeps us in the moment, agile, able to take in new data without the story.
Get curious. Ask what this feeling is trying to tell you? Ask yourself if you are truly in danger. Is it immediate? Anxiety is a messenger just like fear. Its message has to do more with existential threats to our identity rather than our immediate, physical safety.
Breathe. Try slow and deep breaths. Imagine you have gills and breathe in and out of your gills. Count ten breaths. Then twenty.
Focus on your feet. This will literally lower your center of gravity and give you a feeling of being grounded.
The Gift of Fear has been on the New York Times Bestseller list and Oprah has invited De Becker to talk about his work with her viewers numerous times. We will be revisiting his work around fear, especially as it pertains to “good girl conditioning” and why we miss signals in our environment. He says he wants everyone, especially young women to learn about real and perceived threats. I highly recommend reading this book or, check out this video of him talking to college students at St. Francis College. Or this 2015 28-minute video on Open Mind.