The things we make room for

Everyone has that fear.

For some people it's dogs. For others it's spiders, bees, flying, or heights.

Mine?

Ticks.

Even writing the word makes me shudder.

It's irrational in some ways and completely understandable in others.

I know they're tiny.

I know most bites don't cause serious illness.

Logic isn't really the point. Fear rarely is.

Because of it, I've quietly shaped parts of my life around avoidance. Camping has always come with an internal calculation. Is it worth the risk? Are there likely to be ticks there? Maybe we should go somewhere else.

This weekend, I decided not to let fear make the decision for me.

After work on Friday, we packed the car, bundled the children in, and headed off. The tent went up. The children laughed. Everything felt...good.

Then my finger started itching.

There it was.

A tiny six-legged dot, slowly making its way across my skin, looking for somewhere to attach.

A few moments later, there were two more on my daughter's leg.

If you've ever watched a cartoon where the character slowly changes colour before exploding into complete panic, that was me.

Internally, at least.

Something changes when you become a parent.

Somehow you find the superhero costume hidden somewhere inside you and you put it on, even when your knees are shaking.

The rest of the weekend, though, my mind belonged to the ticks.

Every blade of grass.

Every woodland path.

Every cuddle after the children had been rolling down a hill.

They occupied so much mental space that I realised they were becoming bigger than the weekend itself.

And that made me stop.

I asked myself a simple question.

If I could wave a magic wand and remove every tick from this weekend, what would I be doing instead?

The answer came immediately.

I'd be lying in the grass with my children.

Having a picnic beneath the trees.

Building dens in the woods.

Watching them discover tiny creatures I'd normally be too distracted to notice.

Making memories.

Then another thought arrived.

What if, just for today, I acted as though those memories were still possible?

Not because the ticks had disappeared.

But because fear didn't have to take every inch of the experience.

We could check for ticks every evening. We could be sensible. We could do a thorough check when we got home.

The risk hadn't vanished.

But suddenly neither had the joy.

I felt my mind soften.

Not because I'd convinced myself there was nothing to fear.

But because I'd stopped asking fear to leave before I allowed myself to live.

Fear isn't a faulty alarm.

It's a notification system.

I don't think fear asks for permission.

It simply knocks.

Rather loudly.

Almost like the notification on your phone that refuses to disappear until you've looked at it.

Our brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It notices something that might threaten us and says, "Come and look at this."

The problem isn't that the notification appeared.

The problem is when we never close it.

We check.

We scan.

We replay.

We imagine.

We rehearse.

Before long, fear has taken over the entire screen.

This weekend, I realised that's exactly what had happened to me.

The ticks weren't everywhere.

My attention was.

When I asked myself what I would be doing if the ticks weren't occupying every corner of my mind, I noticed something else waiting patiently in the background.

My children.

The woodland.

The laughter.

The memories we had come to make.

The ticks hadn't disappeared.

But my attention had widened just enough to let the rest of life back in.

Attention is like sunlight. Whatever it shines on grows.

Fear is remarkably good at capturing our attention. That's exactly what it evolved to do. If there might be danger, the brain would rather interrupt whatever we're doing than risk missing it.

It tells us to look before crossing the road. It reminds us to protect our children. It encourages us to prepare for genuine risks.

That's all.

The problem is that we often never leave the notification. We keep reopening it, rereading it, checking it, imagining it, scanning for more evidence until the notification becomes the whole screen.

I wonder if that's what happens in the dental chair too.

Patients don't stop hearing the drill because we tell them to relax. Fear has already captured their attention.

But perhaps they don't need the drill to disappear. Perhaps they simply need something else to share the space.

A kind conversation.

A sense of control.

The reassurance that they're making progress.

Little by little, fear no longer occupies the whole landscape.

As a dentist, I see this all the time.

People don't avoid appointments because they're weak.

They avoid them because fear has become so loud that it drowns out everything else.

The relief.

The confidence.

The ability to smile without worrying.

The freedom that waits on the other side.

Perhaps we don't need to silence fear.

Perhaps we simply need to make room for something else alongside it.

Curiosity.

Connection.

Laughter.

Hope.

That doesn't mean we should deny fear. Fear deserves attention. It has earned that role over millions of years of evolution.

But perhaps it only needs our attention for a moment—to assess the situation—not for the entire day.

"I see you. You can come with me if you need to. But you're not driving today."

I wonder how many experiences we would see differently if we stopped trying to eliminate fear and simply learned to carry it a little more gently.