Day 19 – Five fears you have

Day 19 – Five fears you have

Vertigo – While I don’t have acrophobia, i.e. I am not afraid of heights, I do have a type of vertigo. If I am on a bridge or balcony and have something to hold on to I can easily manage and enjoy the view. But if there is no railing, or the railing is lower than my waist, then I get dizzy and have to step back away from the edge or even sit down so that I can get it back under control.

Disability – I have always been quite healthy and mobile, so I am not so much afraid of becoming disabled as unsure of how I would be able to handle it. I suppose I should take heart in the way I handled things when I had my heart attack and there was a high risk that I would not survive it. In that case I was actually quite calm. But the prospect of becoming disabled or dependent on others as I age is not something that I am looking forward to.

Failure of our children’s marriage and impact on our grandchildren – For the past several years my wife and I have been providing daily childcare for four of our grandchildren. There are a lot of potential unstable factors in our daughter’s marriage including medical issues and of course there are always uncertainties in life. If something were to happen to either of them, then my wife and I would have to be involved in caring for our grandsons even more than we are now. But we are not getting any younger, so I have concerns about how we would be able to deal with it.

Collapse of world order – The world is getting more and more unstable. Bombing events are no longer limited to the places involved in these conflicts, but there are rogue agents even among us and there is a lot of potential for events that could affect us directly. Plus there are now rogue states such as North Korea who seem intent on developing missile and nuclear technology that could upset things even more than individual agents. In this period of uncertainty, I fear for how we (and those around us) would react and manage their lives.

That’s only four of the requested five fears, but this has been negative enough that I’ll stop here.