Séamas O'Reilly: Fears are a lot like taste — you find it hard to understand those of others

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

One of the oddest things about fear, generally, is that it doesn’t seem to instil within us much sympathy for the fears of others. My wife’s phobia of mice is alien to me, as is the prevailing disgust everyone seems to have for bees and wasps, which don’t bother me at all. I’ve been stung by both and, while it wasn’t a particularly fun experience, it was … fine?

And yet, I loathe spiders with something like primordial disgust, despite the fact I am 7,000 times heavier than even the largest spider I’m likely to meet in this part of the world, none of which are physically capable of doing me any harm whatsoever.

Fear is a lot like taste — you don’t just have your own proclivities; you find it hard to understand those of others. I can’t abide mint ice cream, to the point that I am incapable of understanding why everyone else on earth appears to love it above all things.

About twice a year, seized by some form of intrepid zeal, I give it a try to see if my taste buds have somehow learned to love the acrid stench of frozen toothpaste, rendering me capable of enjoying the previously gag-inducing blend of milk and menthol others seem to crave. 

I am always disappointed. It is disgusting, and I slink back in my seat filled not with the vindication of being right — which I am — but the deep bemusement of someone who, worse than being wrong, is right all by themselves.

There have been other successes in this field, of course: Brown sauce, oysters, black olives — all foodstuffs I would have balked at during childhood that I now can’t get enough of. And I’d bet folding money there’s not a person reading this who can honestly say they enjoyed their first taste of beer or whiskey, no matter how much they adore them now.

There are tastes we develop, and those we shed entirely. Unfortunately, fear works the same way. Things I used to be scared of, like monsters under the bed, or the theme from Glenroe, no longer trouble me in adult life, and a combination of age and experience have removed any trepidation about extraordinary threats like quicksand and ghosts, or more mundane fears like going to the dentist or speaking in public.

On that last topic, I appear to be particularly lucky, since repeated studies have reported that fear of public speaking ranks above even fear of death in public surveys, meaning that, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “if you have to be at a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy”.

And like taste, progress goes in both directions. I don’t remember ever having a fear of heights as a child, only for a deep horror to arise within me in my thirties. I don’t know when this happened, but I can tell you when I found out it had.

On Tuesday, August 31, last year, I climbed the first, low rung of a wooden ladder to begin an “aerial adventure” at a holiday park with my family.

This was the sort of tree top activity you’ve probably seen before, in which you are fully connected to a harness as you progress through an ever-ascending path through trees, zip-lines, and rope bridges, culminating in a 170m high zip line over a lake. 

It’s hard for me to express how little I enjoyed even the lowest, earliest parts of this experience, or how quickly the blood-curdling dread enveloped my spine and turned my kneecaps to liquid.

I was barely a metre off the ground before I realised I had made a colossal mistake, and one which I was physically incapable of undoing, since the activity required you to be linked, single file, in an unbreakable chain of other punters.

Exiting the experience at any point would have meant forcing the dozen or so people behind me to march backwards to the startpoint, rendering me a coward trapped between two competing forms of cowardice; the fear of falling to my death and the fear of looking like a complete twat in front of a moderately sized crowd. 

I hated every single second of the 45 minutes it took me to run its course, during which I was surrounded by people of all ages and abilities who seemed to be having a great time.

And this, more than anything else, is the true horror. Not that I might hurtle 100 metres to my death as the distant ground beneath me enlarges at the velocity of a Google Earth screen pinch.

But that I, and I alone, keep imagining this happening, while everyone else sits content in their tree-top truss, the freaks and fools who’d be more worried by a nearby bee, all hanging in the air as they dream of mint ice creams to come. 

I don’t mind being right, of course, I’m used to it by now. I’d just rather not be right all by myself.