Tag: fear

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Things that will happen

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You are starting out.  Maybe you are an infant, starting out a lifetime.  Maybe you are starting on a new hobby or large project or a marriage.  You might have chosen to start, or maybe you had no choice.

These are some things that will happen.

  • Phase One: At first you will not be afraid because you don’t understand the risks.  You have not seen anything go wrong, you have not experienced it.  Your body and your spirit are unblemished, at least as far as this thing you start on.  You have youth, either literally or figuratively, and so you naturally feel invulnerable.
  • Phase Two: After some time, it could be a very long time, things go wrong.  For you or for the person next to you.  You will see or experience pain or dismay or shame.  There may be wreckage.  This phase may be repeated.
  • Phase Three: After enough harsh dosing (the exposure required to move you to this next stage depends on an alchemy of your nature, your age and the damage done to you by experience), you will begin to be afraid or discouraged or both.
    • This is the critical juncture.  Will you carry on?
    • This is where many people abandon their projects or their hobbies or their passions or their lives.
    • This is why healthy, strong, middle-aged people grow timid and become spectators and accept a growing impotence.
  • Phase Four: If you carry on, there will ensue an awkward period.  It may be quite long or it may be short, depending on your determination to get away from the discomfort, your acumen and the kind of magic that attends you.  Something has driven you to persist and you may not know what.  You may feel you will only ever be awkward and afraid and vulnerable to damage but also unable to stop moving and you may think you are cursed or insane.  You may be.  Day will follow day and there will be bleakness.  You will cycle back again and again to the decision point and have almost infinite chances to give up.  Mostly, you won’t.
  • Phase Five: If you still carry on, something will change.  You might gain some skill.  Maybe you will become inured to the risks by sheer exposure.  Maybe you begin to understand that existence is a risk — of pain, of damage, of destruction — and those risks in your particular project are only incremental additions to the risks of breathing.  Having come this far, age may help you by passing you over the frightened precipice of middle age into the zone where death could come any time anyway and you may as well die trying.
    • Note: if you have decided not to carry on but are still breathing, this may become the zone of increasing frailty instead.  You will move to a one-story house, away from ice and snow, and be suspicious of strangers and expect dinner at the same time every night and watch only remakes.
  • Phase Six: I can’t tell you what happens next because I have only peeked through the curtain.  I believe you will settle into honing your skill or enjoying your journey or sitting in companionable silence.  Even if no less awkward and inept, you will be less plagued by fear and anxiety.  There will still be setbacks and confusion and failures, you may even slip back a stage or two, but having passed through once, you are likely to carry on.
  • Miscellaneous: Passage from phase to phase will not be linear or predictable.  Inside any given phase, you will not be able to see to an earlier or a later one.  You will have only faith and whatever it is that drives you.  A journey through on one project will help you get through on new and different ones.
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The thing that is not fear but somewhat like it begins to go

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Here are a few things I’ve learned about fear.*

  • In a two year period: I sat with my father while he prepared to die and at the very moment that he did; I slipped over the brink of menopause; I lost my job and got no calls; I fell off my colt and broke my arm; and I tore myself from my beloved home.  From this recipe, or one like it, in mysterious proportion, fear may be conceived.
  • Fear sneaks in and sets up in your spare room.  You can hint that it’s not welcome, you can put away the breakfast things just as it appears of a morning, you can yell and threaten and throw its things outside, but it doesn’t care.
  • It smells like metal.
  • It makes you clumsy, it saps your competence.  With fear there, you are forgetful, stupid.
  • Fear whispers incessantly about the past and the future, especially the future.
  • It weighs you down and also prevents your feet from planting on the earth.
  • It ruins everything.
  • Fear comes close to winning by sheer, tedious ubiquity.
  • But if you try very hard, and you put on clean clothes, and you keep going outside, and you are civil to fear, and you don’t listen to it much, one day it forgets to wake up before you.  You find you are outside and getting on your horse before fear gets out of bed.  You think first of what might be done instead of what could happen.  You start to remember about joy, you are interested.  Fear looks shrunken, a little grey.  You tell it to go to its room and it does.  This is very good.

*I have no right to say any of this.  I live in a first world setting, lounging in the top 10% of income earners, in robust good health.  I don’t know what it means to live in threat.  Maybe I need a new word here, for the existential, self-regarding kind of overwhelming timidity I’ve been host to.  I don’t know what that word would be, my creativity fails me.  Please imagine I came up with a word other than fear and used it here, so that those who truly know fear can keep that word and be the ones who know what it is, while I admit that I don’t.

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“Stay with him and wait”

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Bridger was nervous in the arena.  He was worried about the trash cans outside the fence, where black cats once popped out right under his nose like Halloween Jack-in-the-boxes.  He was skeptical about the safety of the dais at one end where judges looked down on the proceedings.  And he was seriously concerned about the staffer hosing down the alleyway next to the arena.  The shadowy figure, the hiss of the water, the spray and fleeing dust were dreadful to the young horse.

I rode him through our lesson, round and round and across the arena, urging him closer and closer to the worrisome spots while trying not to push him to panic stage.

We were working on some small circling maneuvers near the hose man.  I was keeping Bridger’s attention focused on a minute task in the presence of something scary, trying to take his mind off the threat.  Someday, hopefully, Bridger will look to me in these cases and take my lead on whether there is danger, but we’re not there yet.  He complied with my directions, but stayed alert to the dangerous situation next to us.

Suddenly, Bridger tucked his enormous haunches under himself and launched forward and sideways.  He worked so hard at his instantaneous spook that he let out a huge fart as he went.

My brain lags at these moments — it took me a few milliseconds to realize what was happening.  By the time I processed it, we had jumped halfway across the arena and he was trotting out the end of his spook.  I was securely in the middle of the saddle, hardly a hair out of place.

Here’s what I loved about this.  I was not afraid.  I sat deeply in the saddle and held on to the gullet.  When he was back on four feet, I calmly gathered the reins to prepare to slow him down or simply go on to the next thing.

As he launched into the air with his gaseous assist, my brain spoke very clearly: “stay with him and wait.”  I wasn’t sure what he was doing but I had learned not to panic.  I knew I needed to keep my balance and stay on the horse and that the moment would pass. I learned this the hard way.

Last summer, when Bridger gave out a much less impressive quasi-buck, my brain told me something else: “holy shit! disaster! abandon ship!”  So I did.  I thought his minor upheaval was the beginning of mayhem without end, and I fled.  And got a broken bone and several lasting bruises for my choice.

After months and months of dedicated effort, including a volume of tears and sweat, my instinctive brain was finally able to say something reasonable and helpful.  And correct.  Stay with him and wait.  So I did and all was well.

And now I go forth, hoping to do the same in whatever life throws at me.  Which looks to be quite a bit in the near future.  I hope to ride the upheavals as they go and wait for the moment when I can right the ship.  And keep my bones intact.

 

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In Praise of Small Bites

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I’m a fan of the small-bites approach, to many things, but I suffer doubt whether it’s all that effective.  Our culture generally screams for the whole hog.  Go big or go home and that kind of thing.  Taking small, regular bites seems somehow weak, boring, un-American.  But now I’m convinced.

I used to go big most of the time.  Riding my bike up a steep section, I did it as fast as possible, both to conquer the challenge and to get the difficulty over with so I could rest on the downhill.  I cleaned the whole house in a flurry, and then did almost nothing for much too long.  I lived on an intensity-collapse cycle.  I got a lot of stuff done.

Then I started riding a young horse.  He freaked me out a couple of times with his power and independence.  When he was in a tough spot, going big was no longer an option.  Not for me.  If I bore down and pushed him through these things, he would likely have escalated further before we got through, and I was already past my limits.

On great advice, and with no other plan, I started on the small bite approach.  I worked with or rode him to the degree I could without going too far beyond my comfort zone.  That wasn’t very much at times.  Because it was emotionally so challenging, I couldn’t ride him for very long or do very much before I needed to regroup.  I noticed no change, my entire focus was getting out there and getting to that edge.

I was skeptical.  Small bites move slowly.  They are tedious.  Change is almost imperceptible.  Day after day, I still felt nervous, I still did small things.  The top of the hill stayed just out of sight.

The gradations of challenge with Bridger the colt go kind of like this: groundwork (unmounted) –> riding in the small round corral –> riding in the larger corral –> riding out on our 25-acre property –> riding out around the neighborhood.  At the start, I did 100% groundwork, and slowly started adding portions of the next steps.

Yesterday, I hardly did any groundwork, skipped the round pen, spent a few minutes riding in the corral and then spent most of the time on the road around the neighborhood.  I felt almost no nerves the entire time.  Suddenly, after all those tedious, tiny bites, change erupted.

I like small bites.  I clean my house a little bit every day (well, that’s the plan).  I tackle parts of chores and leave other parts for the next day.  I push quickly up the hill if I want my heart to beat faster, otherwise I stop and look around.  It really works.

 

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Going Steady with Fear

I rode Bridger today.  You’ll understand something about that if you read this earlier post.  It means a lot.

Last summer, Bridger and I hit a big glitch in our progress.  I asked him for a little more than he was ready for, so he gave out a little buck, which was enough to unseat me, which was enough to crack my ulna.  Neither the buck nor the crack were such a big deal.  The killer was the fear that immediately colonized me.

Fear has not been a big thing with me.  Not on a conscious level, anyway.  I’ve had plenty of dicey moments on mountain bikes, on snow-covered slopes in the backcountry, with lightning on the alpine tundra, in class 4 river rapids after I fell out of the boat.  I’ve unexpectedly come much too close to male moose and grizzly bear cubs.  Each event had its adrenaline-soaked excitement and some hindsight shivers, but each easily became a great story to revisit over a beer.  Not so with my fall off Bridger.

I am inherently, helplessly scared of heights. I grow dizzy and watery too close to a precipitous fall.  I feel compelled to go over — if someone forced me to spend too long on a tiny ledge, I might have to plunge over.  So I do have that fear, but I handle it by simply avoiding the situation.  I tried rock climbing, which would have been a good match for my other mountain hobbies, but there wasn’t enough in it to overcome the visceral fear, so I left it behind.  I admire views from a safe distance.  I can’t leave Bridger behind or stay at a distance.

After my fall off Bridger, pictures of people riding horses made me queasy.  Being around my horses at feeding time gave me all-over prickles.  After my arm healed a little, I got on my older horse, Jack, who is as reliable, slow and calm as they come.  I felt sick and loose-limbed.  I shed tears.

I mostly got over it.  With the superb help of friends, a couple sports psychology books and patient Jack, it eased up and left me.  Meanwhile, Kathleen was busy helping Bridger get over his own problem.  Six months after the fall, I was riding Bridger in the backcountry on an unfamiliar trail, having a good time.

This year, we hit another glitch, but on a smaller scale.  You can learn more about that here.

Again, I backed up and brought Kathleen in.  Again, it got better after only a few weeks of focused effort.

So today, I went out by myself and rode Bridger.  I fought back butterflies before I got out to the corral.  I talked out loud to myself when he wiggled his head and slewed his ribs the wrong way and acted like there was a mountain lion in the bush.  It worked out pretty well, but I think I have begun a long-term relationship with fear.  For (maybe) the first time, I have a thing, and a family member, that cannot be denied or left behind and that evoke a new kind of fear.  I’m very happy I got myself out there and had a nice little ride today, but there is much more to understand.