Pi Fear Quotes

In Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, an Indian boy named Pi is stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days with a tiger, named Richard Parker, to keep him company. While Pi is on the boat, he has to take care of himself and Richard Parker to avoid being killed by the tiger. Being all alone in the middle of the Pacific with a tiger strikes fear into Pi. He says, “...If your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you” (162). Fear can be best recognized as the ‘unknown’ because when we do not know something, our minds create the worst possible situation. This quote means that in order truly defeat

When I was younger, I was afraid of something that is exceedingly common among young children. I was afraid of the dark. Even though I knew that there was no monster waiting for me to walk into a dark room and eat me as a snack, I was still extremely scared. Shadows of some chairs look like a person standing in my room watching me sleep, the creaking of the house sounded like footsteps, and branches of trees hitting against a window sounded like a person knocking on the door that only I could hear. My active imagination and lack of logic is what made me afraid of the dark. To conquer this fear, I always made sure that there was at least one light on, even if it was as small as a night light. The light was a security blanket that would keep all of the horrifying ideas that I was afraid of away. As I grew older and I matured, I learned that it was my imagination that aided to my fear of the dark, and that there was nothing to truly be afraid of. Logic and reasoning rose above the fear that was intimidating my younger self. The idea of where fear comes from will never change, but how to use fear to help us will change as we grow

Another time when I was faced with fear was my first ever high school cross country race. I was extremely worried that I would run a poor time and embarrass myself, even though I had no clue on what a good time or a bad time was. There was absolutely no pressure on me to run a certain time or be in a certain place, but my mind created a bunch of “what if” scenarios that put the fear of embarrassing myself in my head. When the race was over and everybody said that I ran a fast time for my first race, I realized that I there was nothing to be afraid of because there was no pressure other than the pressure I put on myself. However, I still get nervous before every race, but after my first race, I learned how to use those nerves and fear to push me to run faster rather than hold me back. I have the same feeling when I’m taking an important test that I studied all night for and I know all of the answers. Instead of letting my brain shut down because of fear that I’m going to fail the test, I tune out all of the bad “what if” ideas that fear feeds my mind and only focus on the task at hand. I learned that if I focus on the present, instead of something that could possibly happen in the future, the fear of the future goes away. If we can disprove the existence of fear in our lives, then we can go on with our