In my daily fifteen-minute trip to work, the fog is a constant. Each day, as I drive through the road across the fields, the morning mist billows up from the pastures and the tilled soil. At the end of a small hill, the fog pools over the tarmac and waits for me. Every time I must let it swallow me whole.
Including today.
As soon as I’m inside the fog, my field of view shrinks. Everything is faded and tinted in a bluish hue. After it has conquered the world around me, the mist tries to conquer me as well. It enters my car, then seeps into my bones, and then everything in my mind turns blue, too. My dreams for the future are fickle and pathetic. I start seeing myself as a wandering soul that’s just searching for a purpose that doesn’t exist.
I try to rationalize it. How can a few water droplets provoke so much anxiety? Is it just fear of crashing into something, or is there something else to it? And also, does everybody think of the fog as a bad thing?
That night, in the safety of my bedroom, I search the internet for more information and a different perspective on this gaseous enemy of mine. My first stop is Wikipedia, where I don’t find much else than what I already know—fog is just a cloud at ground level. I search ‘fog mythology,’ and that’s when I find out that myths have quite a great deal to say about it.
In Rowenathewitch.wordpress.com, for example, I find out how fog was important in Celtic and Gaelic legends, where witches used to summon fog to cover the retreat of women and children; in other tales, fog concealed kings and other important people while they were on important quests. Greek folklore spoke of fog as the veil between the material plane and the world of magic, dreams, and death. Fog concealed a world that wasn’t necessarily scary or harmful… just unknown.
I search, research, and find an Inuit tale, an analysis of Ulysses’s descent to the Underworld, and a short horror movie about a cloud-made monster from outer space, before it finally hits me. People have been scared of fog since the beginning of time—even more so in the past, since they lacked any scientific knowledge of natural phenomena. So they used stories to reframe this strange event in a way that made more sense, or at least gave a meaning, or a reason, for their anxiety to exist. Because with knowledge came acceptance, and acceptance is the opposite of fear.
I stretch on my bed, my mind working so hard it’s almost spinning. For most of my life I associated uncertainty with anxiety, which led to lack of self-confidence and finally depression. But what if I could find my own way to accept the uncertainty? What if I managed to grow enough confidence to be able to endure whatever the fog of the future has in store for me?
For this reason, since I’m already lying on my bed, I decide to improvise a quick meditation session.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and another, until my whole body is relaxed. I picture myself on a wide field, early in the morning. The sun hasn’t come up yet, and the air is cool and so sparkling that it gently tickles my skin.
From the field, which is completely clear at first, comes out a wisp of smoke. Slowly, the wisp coils and grows until it becomes a sheet of caliginous fog, which rolls around me and envelops me. But this envelopment isn’t insidious—it’s kind of gentle actually. Its humidity caresses my face, takes my worries away. And I suddenly realize that in I am protected in the fog. Nobody can see me, nobody can bother me, follow me or attack me. I take a deep breath, and then another, until I become the fog itself. I can’t see myself anymore. The future is an unknown, but so am I. Now that I’ve become one with my uncertainties, I have the potential to take on anything.
It’s a few days later, now. As I’m driving to work, I reach the fog and drive through it. This time, though, there’s no bluish hue, no anxiety, because I know that I’m not the only one to be terrified of uncertainty. Because, paradoxically enough, uncertainty is both the curse and the cornerstone of human nature—and as long as we know this we are able to cope with it.