Mushrooms mind their own business. Spiders, on the other hand, regularly violate my personal space. I find the idea of a little hairy critter with no conception of my personal bubble to be unsettling.

Most of us experience strong, specific emotional responses at one point or another like these, usually related to death or the future. But psychologists believe there might be one underlying, deep, dark fear from which all others originate: the unknown. But “the unknown” is not good enough for me. Something in my gut tells me that regardless of how far you go into the origin of fear, another origin waits to be discovered.

When we have no knowledge of something, we have no power over it. We are not in control—and that is what truly terrifies us. It is why tornadoes are scary. It is why people are often afraid of wild animals or public speaking.

It’s why people are generally more afraid of their loved ones dying or coming down with a terminal illness than they are of suffering these things themselves. It’s why mothers cry when their oldest and then their youngest leave home. Fear of losing control is the true source of all other fears. The fear of the unknown ties back into the fear of having no control.

Lack of control is how I got that chronic gut feeling of fear as a toddler. At that age, I remember that my parents first told me about heaven. Instead of being happy at this mystical idea of eternal reward, I just became nauseated.

It made me sick to my stomach. How could anything possibly be infinite? Am I going to live forever? I did not know the answers to these questions then, and I do not know the answers now. But there is a reason why these unanswered questions scare me other than the fact that they are simply unknown. I have no control over the fact that I will eventually die and face this strange world of eternal nothingness.

I have spent years trying to conceptualize the vastness of the universe, but that feeling pales in comparison to eternity. The idea of eternal life makes me shudder just a bit because given enough time anything that is possible—that is, a nonzero chance—will happen. I would eventually spontaneously combust due to random chance after millions of years, and I have no control over it.

In Issue 3, however, my classmate Molly Taylor wrote about the renowned “Serial” podcast, suggesting that lack of control, namely uncertainty, actually has its benefits. Before writing the article, she told me that she was hooked on the show, which investigated the murder of high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999. In her article, she wrote about the murder mystery, stating that she had come to realize that “it’s more valuable than ever to be indecisive, to need to contemplate conflicting perspectives before reaching a conclusion.” Not everything, after all, fits into a certain black or white box. The gray area in the timeline of one’s life is always there.

Likewise, in January, I read Albert Camus’ Nobel Prize-winning novel L’Étranger with effectively no idea of what it was about. Toward the end of the book, the main character, a murder convict, imagines what his execution will be like. “A guillotine is essentially an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on,” the convict said. “If by some extraordinary chance the blade fails, the prison would have a half-chopped-off head. Then the prison guards simply would start over. The condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that execution would proceed without a hitch.”

There is a lot to learn from this novel. The convict was condemned to sleepless nights and existential dread because he had not a smidgen of control over his fate. No chance, no control. No control, no hope. And the absence of hope is fear. If I knew that were was a zero percent chance of me being happy in my adult life, I would give up all my efforts.

But Camus was an absurdist philosopher, not a Stoic. Stoics have some of the most enduring lessons when compared to absurdism, which is fairly new. Stoics had a clever way of maneuvering fear of the unknown or lack of control, to which Molly alluded already. “You have power over your mind—not outside events,” Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoic emperor of Rome, said in his journal entries. “Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Recognize the events in your life that you do and do not have control over. You can’t control who likes you or how into which you are born. You cannot completely control which college you get into or the classes into which you are placed. You can, however, control the music you listen to, the shampoo you use, the color of your shirt, or even your judgments of the world at large.

When you are frustrated with how events unfold in your life, sometimes the solution really is as simple as to breathe. Most times you should be able to identify your emotion and the reason for it and then let it pass. You likely can’t do anything about it anyway. At the end of the day, all that you can control is your reaction, and all you can do is embody goodness and appreciate what you have, in which we will all find joy.