I don’t like scary movies. There’s something about them that gets under my skin and into the remnants of the overactive imagination I’ve had since childhood
What I do like is actual scary things. Haunted houses, corn fields at night, bats, the rattle of dead leaves behind you on a full moon night, abandoned places, sharks, etc. These things are even better if you have someone else with you who is terrified.
I don’t know why, but I feel like I can be brave for someone else more easily than I can be brave for myself. Maybe this is why growing up, it seems like our parents aren’t afraid of anything. It’s easy to be brave for your child.
I thought about this while learning Sport Lead climbing in the gym this past week. Lead climbing is a more difficult and dangerous form of climbing than top roping because you have to bring the rope with you as you climb and if you fall, the distance you fall multiplies by the amount of slack in the system. This means you can sometimes fall REALLY far. It’s terrifying.
But I don’t want that to stop me. So I did it anyway.
I thought about it too while wandering a corn maze with my husband, an activity he doesn’t particularly enjoy. He says it’s because he doesn’t like being lost. This made me think of the hiker that got lost of the Appalachian trail and starved to death. Being lost is scary. Falling is scary. Life is scary.
But like Thoreau says “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”