Fearless

This is a terribly personal post, but also I suspect a rather universal one - about fear and fearlessness.  When we are very young our fears are generally quite simple and they revolve mostly around our basic need for security.  When we are small and relatively helpless in a big world we are also in many ways blessedly unaware of real physical dangers and if we are lucky are also unencumbered by anxieties and irrationalities that can begin to burden us over time.  That is not always the case, some people are born hard-wired toward anxiety and its attendant irrationality, but for me that was not the burden of my childhood.  I was afraid of the dark at some point, not for fear of the darkness itself but for the absence of line of sight to familiar comforts like my parents.  I was afraid of being left behind (quite rationally, as it happened on a few traumatic occasions), not because I feared the unknown or lacked an explorer's sensibility - but I think the fear of permanent separation outweighed the curiosity of the new and heretofore unexplored.  And sometimes I was afraid of heights.  Not always.  I would scale a tree and sit up in its highest branches, look out from the windows of tall buildings with amazement, but at some point I developed an inconsistent comfort with high places.

As a small child I did indeed fear separation from my parents in the darkness (there were no other substitutes for feeling completely safe in my still forming consciousness) and suffered from night terrors so vivid that I often awoke my entire household with my piercing screams or frenzied somnambulant dialogue outlining the impending peril I was facing in my half-sleep state.  Many was the morning I awoke bathed in a cold sweat and still  hugging my mother's sweater about my head and face as I clutched it during the night to surround myself with her essence to get me through the dark night.  And, after being left behind at the state fair after all of the sisters had been counted off getting into the station wagon, I walked in subtlely widening circles singing "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so" to myself for a little over an hour until my parents realized they were one child short and came back to get me.  Finally, on a trip when I was seven years old to Seattle, all of my sisters ran out onto the balcony of the Space Needle and looked through the telescopes at Seattle and the Puget Sound below - while I clung desperately to my father's pant leg and closed my eyes tightly, eventually vomiting into the wastebasket.

I was in some ways a mass of contradictions, boundless in energy and curiosity to try any new thing or explore any new place, but also crippled at times by fears that baffled my parents.  When I was five I nearly drowned in the pool at the hotel we were staying at in San Diego because I let go of the side and slipped under the water in the deep end unable to swim , and at six I was swimming out to the buoys in the shockingly cold water at Lake Tahoe on my own.  Painfully introverted, I would nonetheless plunge into a circle of children and soon be leading them on some adventure.  Unable to comprehend why I would sometimes fear perfectly normal things, or why I was the one child in the family who had such disturbingly vivid dreams that could turn everyday objects in my room into other-worldly terrors while viewing them through my open but sleeping eyes,  I asked my mother.  She said something that seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but it may have been the most sage thing I had ever heard.  "Sometimes, sweety babe, we see and hear things that aren't about today.  I think you see things much farther down the road sometimes, but your little mind isn't formed enough to cope with them."  She comforted me that what was in my dreams wasn't real in the very next breath, but I understood on some level that she was saying what was in my dreams was real.

One night a number of years ago I was walking down the narrow street we lived on with my children and one of their friends.  I was a Halloween spook walk, because our streets had no streetlights, the houses were all generally set back from the street and the trees were tall and mature, their branches making eerie shadows in the moonlight in time to the startling whispers of the wind.  My two younger children were clinging to me so tightly that I had trouble walking, but my oldest and her friend were enjoying the adventure, the spectacle.  Other than the restraint of two rigid little bodies wrapped around me and fingernails cutting into my arms and legs, I was at peace.  I really couldn't say at what age I shed any fear of the dark but I had such an awareness in that moment of fearlessness.

Many years before that, when I was young and single and living life on my own terms as I was wont to do, I was riding my racing bike in the canyon between San Ramon and Moraga, flying down and narrow, winding road at close to forty miles an hour and as the wind slapped me in the face as I rounded a corner my breathing halted momentarily.  I had to catch myself and will air out of my lungs and then back in, and I slowed the bike down.  Fearless, to the point of recklessness.  That was not as peaceful a feeling when it caught up to me like that.  I loved cycling, did it most every day after work, then took a boat out to row on the reservoir in Lafayette, and then went home for the night.  But, I understood I needed to slow down a bit.  I understood I was overcompensating as I had been for a few years in many different ways, to prove to myself I wasn't powerless.  I'd endured a significant trauma a few years earlier, barely survived it actually, and had been racing and pushing and testing my own limits whenever I got the chance ever since.  A cycling accident a few days after that revelation in the canyon, albeit at a much slower speed, sidetracked me for a few weeks while broken bones and stitched up head wounds healed.  While resting up one evening I dozed off in a chair on our back deck and fell into a dream.  I understood in the dream that what my mother had said to me as a child was very true.  I remembered my greatest fear while being whisked off into the night in a strange place as the gravity of my circumstances began to become clear, was that this was where I would die - in this piercing night in an unfamiliar place.  I wasn't so much afraid of death itself or even of the pain on the way to death, but I thought I was never going to see my parents again.  That was the terribly unsettling thing to me at the time, the overwhelming thing. Everything comfortable and familiar and secure would be gone forever and what was happening now would be the last things I would know.  Except even at the time, I was still my mother's child, still me, and I struggled to push those unsettling thoughts aside.  'I awoke on the deck into the stillness  of night.  I wasn't afraid or startled and the objects around me weren't distorted or threatening.

I resumed cycling a couple of weeks later, although I remember literally being shaky as I stood over my new racing bike and kicked off from our curb.  I had hit the ground, with my face, at twenty plus miles an hour and skidded forward thirty feet before landing in brush out of sight of the trail, bleeding profusely from the head and face and eventually losing consciousness.  Had a young boy not seen the accident and come to my aid, well, who knows.  So, I had felt up close and personal the worst that could happen, essentially, when riding my bike.  I shook that off because I also knew the best that could happen, and it was the freedom, the propelling myself forward under my own steam with nature all around me.  I stopped shaking and just started riding.