I’ll be the first to admit that more than a few things frighten me – unleashed dogs, letters from the IRS, taking out my son’s lunch box to pack on Monday morning only to discover the lunch I thought he had eaten on Thursday is still inside.

While everyone is entitled to his or her own individual obsession – such as arachibutyrophobia (the fear of peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth) or gelotophobia (the fear of laughter) – there is one phobia, called nyctophobia, fear of the dark, that affects almost half American adults today. Triggered by threats that are either real or imagined, it prevents people from going out at night, sometimes just to the car to get a bag they forgot to bring in earlier, and causes panic during power failures.

The dust is swirling in the air, the Pine-Sol is dripping down the cabinets, and the fake brownies are baking in the oven. While all of these are definitely the harbingers of our most intense Yom Tov, if there is one thing that says “Pesach is here” it is potatoes.

As each generation has become increasingly vege-phobic, limiting their weekly intake of green foods to pickles and mint chocolate chip ice cream, families feel lost without flour to fill in most of their meals. During this challenging time when pantries are bare and restaurants are closed, the community faces the threat of starvation, whether real or imagined. After all, there is a limit to how many nights in a row you can eat corned beef. (So I’ve heard; I have not personally reached that ceiling.) Nothing is readily available except baby fingers (which must be somewhat traumatizing for the children) and macaroons, which we buy every year, despite the fact that no one likes coconut. My theory is that we are so disoriented from the late-night arguments with our ovens and the exposure to toxic cleaning chemicals that, by the time we do our shopping, we honestly think that those macaroons will taste like the much-more-fashionable macarons. (They won’t.)

Now that the temperature has finally dropped, we hurry from our homes to our cars to our homes, and we have enough hot cocoa powder to satisfy everyone’s early morning needs. During these winter months, mothers everywhere shudder at the sight of children playing outside on chilly afternoons without their jackets. The sound of laughter and the crunching of dry leaves are knit together with the distinct call, “Go put on a jacket! I’m cold just looking at you!”

For thousands of years, people have erroneously thought that being cold caused one to catch a cold. The true culprit, however, was finally apprehended in the late 1700s by Benjamin Franklin, who, in addition to being a Founding Father, diplomat, and inventor, was a member of the Royal Medical Society of Paris and a few U.S. medical societies. Through his own observation and analysis, he understood that respiratory diseases came from other people and not from spending time in the crisp air without a coat. Franklin recommended that everyone breathe some fresh air each day, and he personally lived a long, fulfilling life taking his own “medicine.

A frozen landscape stretches out before you, empty in every direction. You feel like crying in despair but don’t dare because your tears would freeze as soon as they were formed. The cold claws of the Antarctic winter grip your throat in an unmerciful vice, trapping your voice with its silent strength.

Although this scenario is both literally and figuratively the polar opposite of the scorching Sahara, they have one thing in common: they are both deserts.

A desert is defined as any region that receives less than 10 inches of rainfall per year, which means that the continent of Antarctica is actually the world’s largest desert. Both hot desserts, such as the Sonoran and Mojave, as well as cold ones, like the Atacama and Gobi, are included in this category.

You feel the air getting thinner as your lungs cry out with each shallow breath. Your legs are burning with the strain, threatening to collapse. Although you’ve been training for this moment for months, your oxygen-starved brain can only follow one command – to put one foot in front of the other. Each step brings you closer to the summit.

As darkness descends a bit earlier each evening, our opportunity to notice the night sky increases. Gazing up at our galaxy spread out before us like a luminous tapestry, one can’t help but feel very, very small. The absolute vastness of space is so overwhelming that we can easily lose ourselves in its ostensibly endless depths. At the same time, we know that everything was created especially for us, and being aware of the essential role that we play in holding up the universe imbues us with a universal sense of purpose, making us feel very, very significant.