Do you go all anxious when you see a spider? All weak at the knees and heart pounding?
Especially when you were a child?
I know I was. Their shape and weird legs freaked me out. So too the Crane Fly a.k.a the Daddy Long Legs. All gangly and buzzy flying around.
Maybe you did (and still do) what I did then. I gave them a big whack and flattened them solid. Once they were dead they could do me no harm. Of course now I’m older and wiser I know they wouldn’t have done me any harm anyway. My mind believed otherwise. It got scared, created a narrative (you might die) and so I lashed out in fear.
I killed what I was scared of. That’s what us humans are very good at in life. We try to kill (or do kill) what we are scared of now and in history.
On a stormy night near Hartlepool in the north of England during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship floundered off the coast with all hands. Apart from one. The ship’s mascot – a monkey. Locals had never ever seen a monkey before, nor a Frenchman either. The chattering of the monkey they took for French and their mind began to work overtime in terror.
They decided then and there on the beach to hang the monkey as a spy.
That’s the story in local folklore but it’s the story of human minds in general.
Going off the rails.
Most fears are unfounded. They are constructed on some incorrect fiction and blown out of proportion. Individually it can cause us to overreact, but collectively in can form mass hysteria.
The early 1800’s saw the wider development and usage of trains in Britain. Previously travel and transport of goods was through horses and canals. The advent of trains appeared hyper fast and caused many to worry if the human body was capable of withstanding the speeds they would go (barely 30mph in those days).
Irish Writer, Dionysius Lardner, wrote in 1830, ‘Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia’. Not to be outdone authors Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in ‘The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present’, that trains were thought to ‘injure the brain’.
These above beliefs took root in the psyche of many travellers. The rolling and clanking of the train cars over the rails sent many people off them. The newspapers were often reporting individual cases of “railway madness” in the 1870’s. One Scottish aristocrat reportedly stripped naked and began leaning out of the window ranting in a crazed state.
The mind had been disturbed by something it had become scared of….that just wasn’t true. But, that’s how fears work, right?
Killing our best.
The historical stories above typify what is still about in today’s world. Namely, that we kill what we don’t understand, or through gossip, or from our own plain anxieties.
That may always remain so. There is, though, the more personal killing we all have participated in over the years. Killing our best.
How many great ideas have you had that you have ‘killed’ in your mind? Ones for a business or a lifestyle change for yourself that you ‘got rid of’? This is due to your deep inner fear that you will end up disappointed, losing, or most of all, embarrassed as it and you fail.
So, rather than letting it ever see the real light of day, you kill it in your head first. Often before any other human on the face of the Earth ever knew about it. I think we all have done that at some time or other.
It’s lunacy now to look back and believe a monkey could be a spy or train’s could stop us breathing. And that’s the call of this post – look back at YOUR history and see what you have killed that never deserved to be. Something that fear made you want to get rid of rather than welcome it and see what it really could be.
It’s time to get that monkey off your back and yourself back on track by no longer killing what could open up your whole world forever.
If you need to kill anything, kill the fears that won’t let your dreams live.
References – atlasobscura.com – ‘The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity’.
Hartlepoolunited.co.uk – ‘Hanged Monkey’.