this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Philosophy
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Fear is sometimes like a building on fire. If you freeze up, it will consume you. And if you walk through it, you'll get burned. Sometimes, if you have time, you can face it slowly, but those are usually old ingrained fears, which sometimes keep reappearing in a new form.
Fear is also a warning sign that something is amiss, and without knowing what it is, it's hard to adress it. Some people could end up being or feeling defined by the fears, instead of being defined by their lives. But fears come and they go. It can be like fire and all consuming. It can also be calmly exciting like the water in a river you need to cross, curious what's on the other side.
Oh yeah, fear of fire is a big one for me too.
When I still lived in Amsterdam, I experienced an apartment fire. I was living on the top floor of an apartment building, right underneath the roof. At some point, roof workers were burning the roof with tar, which I think is an accepted technique for making the roofs water proof. But one day they went for their lunch break, while leaving the torch ignited. What happened is that the roof caught fire, crept towards the gas canister attached to the torch, which then exploded with a bang loud enough to put me on local television because the canister happened to have exploded directly above my bed.
Thank God I was working at the office that day, because from the place where my bed was, you could look up straight to heaven after that explosion.
You wouldn’t want to know how many times I lay awake asking myself what-if questions after that. Can’t recall the nights.