What Really Makes Us Human?

Karen Thompson Walker: What Can Fear Teach Us?

We grow up thinking of fear as a weakness and a danger in and of itself; however, fear is something a lot more than that. It’s something that we conquer, fight, and overcome, and I think it’s a huge aspect of our lives that makes us human.

In a way, fear is a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. In her presentation, Walker states, “Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?” In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And sometimes, our fears can predict the future, as our worst fears may come true.

If we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors as well as the readers of those stories. The way in which we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives. Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. In addition, having fearful emotions allows people to obtain a little wisdom, insight, and truth about ourselves and the society we live in.

Throughout her presentation, Walker attempts to get her point across mainly by the use of ethos and logos. In her TED Talk, Karen Thompson Walker uses ethos by stating that she is a fiction novelist and a writer of one of the best-selling books of 2012, The Age of Miracles. In this book, a young girl and her family awake one morning to discover that the rotation of the Earth has suddenly begun to slow, stretching the length of the 24-hour day and throwing the natural world into disarray. The book has been acclaimed one of the best books of the year by People, O: The Oprah Magazine, New York Times, and many more industries for its exquisite examination of the connection between fear and the imagination. Knowing this allowed me to look at the credibility of her points more respectably. With past research and experience of the topic, she seems to be thoroughly aware of the argument she is making.

Another crucial way Walker gets her point across is through the use of logos. She states several facts from past historical experiences that support the argument she is trying to make. One main example is the 1819 story that she carried on through the beginning of her presentation, up until the end. In 1819, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile. The fears that the crew’s imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific included being eaten by cannibals, battered by storms, or starving to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died.

Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism; the fear that had danced in their minds of what could happen to them. I think what Walker was trying to convey by telling this story was obviously to support her idea that fear is like a story, but to also bring about the idea that how we cope with our fears and what we do with them can really dictate the path your life will take. If you choose to ignore your fears, or take the easy way out of avoiding them, I think you risk the notion of fully fulfilling your life. Our lives are about conquering and achieving goals, and I’m not really sure you can truly do that if you’re running away from your fears your entire life.

               So, if you’ve read thus far, you might be wondering why I picked this TED Talk to view and interpret. Truth is, I wanted to know the answer to the title of the talk: What can fear teach us? And, to be honest, I think I did find that answer. There’s this saying I’ve heard and kept in the back of my head for quite some time now: “Fear is stronger than love”. It’s crazy to think about because we grow up learning that the strongest emotion we can feel is love, but then we’re introduced to this frightful sensation that can really dictate our actions in our lives. Personally, I still have many fears, but I must say that I had a lot more growing up, even up until high school. I think as we grow older and mature, we learn to cope with our fears, but do we ever think about what our fears teach us? After listening to Walker, I think that fear teaches us of the person we have the ability to become. If we can analyze and conquer our fears, we can understand the true person we are and gain insight on everything around us. Doing this, I believe, allows us to obtain true life fulfillment, and justly makes us human.