If The Worst Comes To The Worst

We are often terrified of so many things: disgrace, illness, unemployment, our mortality, the suffering and death of loved ones. When these fears arise, we are often encouraged, out of kindness, to think of the best-case scenarios. This is a well-meaning move, but it also – unintentionally – leaves our fears to fester. They fill us with unnamed dread and sometimes loom far larger than they should. Therefore, the opposite move – as displayed here – involves looking our anxieties directly in the eye, refusing to be cowed by them and examining them exhaustively so as to drain them of their debilitating power. Doing this can bring us to an important realisation: we could cope, even if the worst did come to the worst.

What follows are some invitations to meditate on scary things; not in order to depress us, but to lend us a buoyant, optimistic sense of our resilience and adaptability.