During one of the weekday, I had an interesting encounter while hitching a ride in a friend's car after lunch. Rather, I'd say it was a very funny encounter actually. It was a rare case of arachnophobia. In fact it was my first case of knowing someone who suffers from arachnophobia!
It's funny because we were driving back and just as we are about to enter a roundabout she suddenly starts yelling and freaking out. I am staring at her wondering what in the world just happened? When I say yelling and freaking out, I really mean shouting at the top of her voice almost as if she just saw a ghost coming out from under the driver's seat like in the Japanese horror show Ju-On.
Because we were in a car and she was driving, her sudden reaction like that was scary and freaking out while on the wheel is honestly, really the last thing a passenger would want to see. So I looked at her and asked what just happened and I got this surprising answer - "There's a spider on the windscreen!!!!".
So I turned to look at the windscreen to find a spider. Yes, she was not imagining a spider after overeating lunch. It was a real spider, green in colour about............................... half a centimeter in diameter. I definitely got my facts right when I said half a centimeter. But that's not all. The spider was outside the car and I told her to drive fast enough to blow the spider away but she was so afraid that she was actually convinced that if we left the spider roaming on the windscreen, it'll ultimately find its way into the car. She continued to bug me to get rid of the spider.
Hence, I found myself winding down the window and sticking my hand out to swipe the poor four legged creature from the car.
Despite the good laugh and amusement I had from the scene, it serves as a good reminder to each of us that there's nothing too small that can scare us. There are countless types of fear that each one of us have. Some people find the sight of blood disgusting, some can't take spiders, some afraid of heights, some afraid of the dark, and the list goes on. The funny thing about life is that sometimes the very thing we fear could also be the very thing that could save us in dire situations - imagine you need to jump off a building that's on fire into a fire brigade trampoline when you are afraid of heights.
We are humans and we can be just as fragile mentally and thus, fearing something is almost inescapable. We may not like to admit it but facing our own fears more often than not becomes the very remedy to calming our fears.
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