Face Your Fears

     What are you scared of?  One is tempted to chuckle and joke about haunted houses and ghosts and dark alleys when asked that question.  But being lost on a remote trail or broken down on a deserted road can bring about entirely new fears...being injured and alone or of not finding your way out; perhaps even the thought of possibly dying.   Whether it's confronting tight spaces, heights, getting up on stage, spiders, deep water, or any of a number of other things, the question of what it is that frightens you could go on and on.  For me it is the thought of deep ocean water, or any body of unknown water.  I can admire it to no end: from a cliff, from a ship's railing, from a bridge or pier, sometimes even swimming in it; but the thought of diving freely into it and feeling carefree and at peace is indeed just that, a distant almost never-to-be-explored thought.  

     Not so for Roger Deakin who wrote: The uncomfortable pebble beach shelves steeply, and I was glad to subside into the sea, swimming immediately in deep water, black and treacly after the lightness of the Waveney the day before.  Far out past the breakers, shifting like a porpoise in the swell, I had the illusion that the shadowy cliffs were visibly receding...I was the only bather in the cool night sea, and everything was very distant.  Admirable but scary to me, that image.  I can recall sailing in Hawaii, my friend stopping his small boat so we could dive in the water and just explore.  The water was crystal clear, the bottom of the boat (now 30 yards or so away from us) as visible as if floating in glass; and then I looked down.  The water went from an azure blue to a darkening shade of blue, and it appeared that there was no bottom...and the boat was moving away ever so slowly.  

     My brother is much the same as me, cautious to a tee when it comes to the ocean, all while others in our family venture further and further out, past zones 1 and 2 and out into that border of open ocean and the edge of land (the fish are huge, they tell us, but it does little to allay our fears).  My brother went a step further than I did however, taking a night dive with friends to hunt for lobsters (snorkels only and not diving gear).  It started in a place called Shark's Cove, an area steeped in tradition as a Hawaiian sacrificial point which supposedly once filled with sharks; whether legend or real the area was known for its swift currents, a circular rip tide of sorts that rapidly pulled you out to deep water before depositing you some two miles down in another cove.  "Don't fight it," my brother's friends told him, "just go with the flow."  

     Here's how Deakin put it when he did something similar, jumping into an incoming tidal swell: I threw myself in and...felt the incoming tide lock onto my legs, and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore.  Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched.  But I soon grew used to it; seaweed all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself about me.  I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell.  Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus.  The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me.  I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell-runner on the downhill lap.  It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape.

    So who is this Deakin author, one who had a Dutch reader write this about him: Many sentences in each of his books are as if engraved in me, find a resting place, a recognition, they are magnifying glass, lens and microscope to the natural world, a watery surface through which I look to see the earth clarified.  Roger Deakin died some 15 years ago of a brain tumor, but not before writing several best-selling books about his explorations of the natural world, his book Waterlog detailing his efforts to swim the rivers and estuaries of Britain and to explore the ancient world below (his books sold extensively in the late 1990s and are only now being released in the U.S.).  

    There is a certain mystery and calling to these hidden worlds, the people who ascend cliffsides without fear (or ropes), or those who venture deep into the earth (caves that a 747 can fly through?).  But it was The Atlantic's staff writer, James Parker, who suggested a new approach, that of embracing our weaknesses and fears; here he talks about a simple exercise...using your non-dominant hand: The biology of handedness is complex.  But the psychology, it seems to me, is pretty straightforward.  It goes like this: Inside your nervous system lives a shadow person, a shadow you, shy and clumsy, dislocated, light-fearing, not nearly as good at things as you are.  An underachiever who would very much like to be left alone.  And you get in touch with this person, immediately and directly, by using your weaker hand.  Work the left, say the sports coaches.  Learn how to catch a ball, throw a punch, make a shot with your weaker hand.  Shouldn’t the life coaches say it too?  By summoning your gauche self, the muzzy and foot-dragging character who rises and sleeps with you, you’re doubling your capacities.  Treat this character with a stern kindness, with a reproving warmth.  Insist on discipline.  Marvel, humbly, at the slowness of the progress.

    Our fear/s may be little more than that "shadow" side of us, a memory imprinted into our heads from childhood, or a survival reminder that we shouldn't repeat something foolish (and possibly damaging) to our bodies and perhaps minds.  So I jump back to Deakin: To swim is to experience how it was before you were born.  Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb.  These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control.  This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water...When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens.  Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.  The lifeguards at the pool or the beach remind you of the thin line between waving and drowning.  You see and experience things when you're swimming in a way that is completely different from any other.  You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complex and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.  In wild water you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level.

     Perhaps those who embrace the "other" world, people who sail or climb or explore caves or defuse bombs --or countless other encounters, purposely or accidentally-- are experiencing a side of life that few of us see, but a side that has always been there.  We may be content to ride that roller coaster or bungee jump from that bridge, knowing that we are safely backed up and an element of fear has been removed.  But beyond that may rest the unknown.  No-ropes climber Alex Horrold told The Financial Times: “One of the sensations that I love about soloing is the feeling of being really big and really small at the same time.  Being on a 3,000ft wall makes you feel like this tiny insignificant speck, and if you fell off, you’d be dead, and nothing would actually change -- nature doesn’t care.  It really puts you in your place; you’re just nothing in the grand scheme of the world.

    Julie Yip-Williams, legally blind since age 4, wrote in her book: I know there are those who think I was nuts for choosing to travel by myself and for actually liking it...traveling alone was my bliss...As I traipsed through the hidden back alleys of China's ancient cities and the winding medieval streets of Florence, and the unfriendly boulevards of post-Communist Budapest, searching for a youth hostel, tea house, or museum, frustrated and angry at my inability to see the numbers on buildings and read the names of businesses, I learned to control the frustration and the rage at my physical limitations.  I had no choice but to find my way, for no one was there to help me.  I tapped into reserves of courage and resourcefulness that I would have never known existed but the fact that I had consciously and willingly put myself into such trying circumstances...There was also a tantalizing freedom in encountering those who knew nothing about me...In these strangers' eyes, I stopped being the invalid I'd always known myself to be and I could re-create myself, transform myself into someone brave and smart and funny and engaging.  I'll never forget the mysterious Swedish girl in Paris with a broken back, traveling alone in a wheelchair, with whom I shared a hostel room for one night; she told me that I was worthy of love -- I know how cheesy that sounds, but that kind of sentiment is most welcome when you're traveling around the world on your own.  Or the compassionate Dutchman who took the time to describe to me the details of a seascape he saw with his photographer's eyes.  Or the tortured Turkish-American girl who dragged me to all the techno bars in Beijing as if the loud thumping music would drown out the things that haunted each of us.  All of these people whose threads of life have touched mine taught me about different ways of living, thinking, and being, and in doing so enriched my consciousness and touched my soul.*

Pt. Reyes National Park   Photo: John McKinney

     Perhaps embracing that fear is as simple as walking into that shop you'd normally pass, or ordering that menu item just on a whim.  Perhaps it's asking that question or listening to an answer, or breaking the routine of your daily life.  I often think back to my days staring out over the beauty of Point Reyes, the beach below as inviting and as empty as are so many of the beaches that line the northern California and Oregon coast; the beach was also packed with signs that barked Do Not Swim and warned of "sneaker waves," waves that unexpectedly emerge at 5 or 7 times the normal size and can sweep children and adults into it's grip (and have).  My surfer friend stared at those waves with a completely different view; "I could surf that," he calmly said, almost locked into his own bliss.  Not me...my body still remembering my close encounter with the power of the ocean.  But it made me realize that my thoughts were not the thoughts of others, that some embrace the unknown, the challenge, the obstacles, imaginary blockades that perhaps only I am seeing.  I had to remember that all it might take to overcome such fears, even when faced with that final journey into the unknown, might be little more than being told by someone, even a Swedish woman with a broken back and in a wheelchair traveling alone, that you are worthy...worthy of just being yourself, fears and all.  Worthy of being loved...

*By the age of 30, Julie Yip-Williams had travelled alone to all 7 continents (not Australia but to New Zealand, which she felt was close enough to count it as having stepped foot in all 7); unfortunately she also contacted colon cancer and succumbed to that at the age of 42, leaving behind her husband and two daughters.  At 28 she was told by her mother that her grandmother (as per cultural tradition) told her to "kill" the baby due to Yip's visual defect, to do "...what's best for her and for this family," the grandmother said.  It was only when Yip's great-grandmother, the true matriarch of the family, found out about this and issued the final order: How she was born is how she will be.  Wrote Yip-Williams as she faced her cancer: ...the bliss that can come from my cancer-fighting journey cannot be so different from the bliss I once knew traveling the world.  There are extraordinary people whom I have met and whom I have yet to meet on my present course.  There are lessons to be learned, resourcefulness and discipline to be cultivated, good to be done, and courage, strength, grace, resolve, and pride to be gained.  I know this to be true...All of it is part of my solitary journey, a journey that I embrace wholeheartedly and with as little fear as possible, for I know that through my wanderings, I will once again find the same bliss.