Fear

I had a colleague, during one of my many corporate stints (all of them all too brief, I am afraid, so to speak), whose favourite opening gambit while delivering his considered view was " My fear is....".The guy, despite being highly intelligent, very hard working and being a loyal soldier, has had one of those "thus far and no further' kind of careers.

Is fear something to be afraid of? Far from it. I once worked in a factory that had hired a Japanese quality control consultant. He told me a fundamental principle of the famed Japanese approach to quality. "Think of every defect as a gem because it is  a precious opportunity in the quest for the perfect" he said.

Fear is also an opportunity provided, of course, you are not afraid of it!

My colleague who was afraid all the time - afraid that an idea was too radical, afraid that the client would reject the plan, afraid, afraid afraid - stopped at being afraid instead of seizing each moment when his sphincter muscle tightened as a moment of incipient insight and competitive advantage.

When TS Elliot wrote in his poem "The Waste Land" about showing "fear in a handful of dust" he was implying that fear is a chimera beyond which lies the truth. It is quite revealing that the quatrain that follows this assertion is among the most beautiful and lyrical that Elliot has written:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.

From the sublime heights of Elliot let me climb down to earth. "Dar Ke Aage Jeet Ha" (beyond fear is opportunity). Gulp! Because as this intrepid copywriter implied, fear can be conquered as long as you had this variety of fizzy drink at hand. Obviously the man (or was it a woman?) did not fear reducing the sublime to the trite. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Who indeed?