So what's your terror du jour? A subway bombing here like the first one in London that killed more than 50 people? Or have you kept global terror at bay but find you are suddenly overwhelmed by the perhaps irrational fear that you're about to lose your job?
Whether our fears are rational or irrational, when they are uppermost in our minds or in the public consciousness, they can be very real.
Fear "best thrives in the present tense," according to Freakonomics, a current New York Times best-seller that challenges conventional thinking.
Imagine, write authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think would get the funding fastest? Terrorism, of course.
Yet the chances of a person being killed in a terrorist attack are still "infinitely smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease," they write.
Immediacy matters, say the authors. "A terrorist attack happens now;" death by French fries, on the other hand, is some "distant, quiet catastrophe."
In a heightened global atmosphere of renewed and relentless terrorist bombing, it's only normal to think what if it happened here?
And so, on the morning after the second wave of London attacks, I am sheepishly relieved when a loved one chooses to drive to work instead of taking public transit (which ironically means he has a greater imminent chance of dying in a car accident to or from work than on the subway).
And a young man I know who does ride the subway recounts, with embarrassment, feeling uneasy about a "suspicious-looking" guy who was reading what he thought was a religious text and muttering to himself. When the young man, safely at work, Googled the "religious text," it turned out to be The Ten Demandments, a book about customer satisfaction.
The easy, queasy ways that present-tense fear enters our lives is not, of course, confined to possible terrorist attacks.
When the company we work for is restructuring, announcing lay-offs and offering buy-outs, we are sure in our gut, all evidence to the contrary, that we are next on the hit list. Someone's got to take the hit, why not us?
Stress expert Dr. David Posen suggests in his most recent book, The Little Book of Stress Relief, that it helps to be aware of the difference between worry, "which is really unproductive," and concern, which is less emotional, more intellectual and involves caring for others as well as ourselves.
Worry that the subway system is not a safe way to commute does not put us in touch with our humanity -- but concern over the rising tide of terrorism does.
In other words, fear can have a positive role but we need to be careful how we deal with it. Fear should make us cautious and prudent, said Dr. Posen, "but it shouldn't shrink our world."
As an example, he says that when there were several incidents in Toronto of people pushing other people onto subway tracks, he made a decision to always stand with his back against the wall waiting for his train. But he didn't make a decision that riding the subway was a bad thing to do.
So what is the healthiest attitude toward whatever your terror du jour is? It can't be to completely ignore it, because some fears are rational and can save your life: You could, for example, actually get killed ignoring the sudden lurch of fear you feel when you've stupidly jaywalked without looking and turn suddenly to see a car speeding your way.
A sudden lurch of fear at work is usually not indicative of a threat to your life. I'm not talking about the steady drip of fear in a punitive work culture. I'm talking about the jolt of adrenaline-causing fear because you've screwed up, momentarily lost the plot or just know in your bones that all is not clicking as it should. That fear can be a helpful signal to take action, whether it's correcting an error or intensely buckling down to productive work.
The truth is that we believe we have more control than we actually do in some circumstances, and less control that we actually do in others. Driving a car, for instance, seems less dangerous to many of us than flying, perhaps because we think we are in control. In reality, other drivers have an equal amount of control over our destinies as we do.
We can't control random terrorism on a subway either but, in a larger sense, I suppose we can try to control our fates by electing leaders who demonstrably value human life and human dignity the world over.
Back on a micro daily basis, here is what we can really reasonably control: the quality of our relationships -- aim for interactions in which you neither diminish nor feel diminished. And the quality of our work -- aim for excellence; it does dispel fear.
Oh, and we can definitely control what we have for lunch: Try not to eat too many French fries. They can lead to heart disease which, in all likelihood, will kill you before terrorists do.