Understand your Perceptions

Having followed Matt Green’s walk across the US last year, I was ecstatic to see that he’s made a followup post, 1 year later, about what he learned on his walk.  Do yourself a favour, take half an hour out of your day and read this post.  It’s a game changer.

At some point on my walk it struck me that most of the fears people had for me were about things they knew nothing about. People in rural areas thought I was going to get murdered in the inner city. People in cities thought some crazy rancher in Montana was going to shoot me for setting foot on his property. The people in the Rocky Mountains weren’t the ones afraid of grizzly bears and mountain lions; it was the people back east who only knew about the attack stories they heard on TV. One guy in Wisconsin told me he wouldn’t dare walk across Montana without a gun to shoot all the rattlesnakes. But, as I learned from people who live in Montana, rattlesnakes, like most animals, do their best to stay out of the way of humans and only attack if they feel threatened. And then I saw the parallel between these people’s fears and that story about the Israeli wall. It’s only when people are isolated from some potential danger that they really begin to fear it in a way that’s totally out of proportion. When we let our expectations of danger make decisions for us, we end up avoiding the very experiences that have the power to change those expectations. In that way, our fear of the world is self-sustaining. We never give ourselves the chance to learn that our fears are baseless, because we isolate ourselves from the situations that can challenge our fears.