A recent story on CNN (www.cnn.com/...) got me to thinking on when I felt the most at peace and realized that it was when events were uncertain, but depended on my actions to a large extent. This was, and always has been, when I was in the desert or some other wild place, where a misstep could be dangerous. Somehow that very uncertainty was comforting! It dispelled all or most of the often inflated anxiety of daily living and paradoxically led to a dissipation of my own fears. I am not sure how to describe it, but somehow I felt free and at ease. This was especially true during my trip to Baja Sur, Mexico, in fall of 1972 with my major professor and some of his other grad students. It was as if the petty cares of life had vanished and I had become a master of my own fate. It was truly exhilarating!
Why should this be? Well for one thing it really sobers one up. Being in a constant maelstrom of petty cares, just washes away, and one truly lives in the moment. You are the one who figures out how to avoid a range bull, get over a narrow part of the path, avoid a rattlesnake just ahead of you, make sure of your footing on loose gravel, take precautions against sunburn, etc. You depend on a few people, or just yourself, as I had to do when I was driving the roads in northern and eastern New Mexico or hiking by myself. Life or death situations can be close, but somehow that is not as frightening as when unnamed people are able to decide your fate by their uncaring actions or their downright malice.
I well know the demon of anxiety, having survived emotional abuse from my parents from an early age. But in Baja and in later trips to the Florida Keys, to Sycamore Canyon and the Camino del Diablo along the Arizona/Sonora Border, the Northern Range of Trinidad and the Sierra de Luquillo in Puerto Rico, or the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, I was mostly on my own and a few people’s hands and not dependent on a faceless group of people, most of whom I’d never meet.
One of the great difficulties of modern life is the fact that the misstep of one person you don’t even know can decide your fate. In fact this has been true since the dawn of civilization, but the likelihood that the person who makes the difference in your life will be known to you has diminished as the population has ballooned. I was once followed by a motorist who thought I had cut them off. I am to this day not sure if he was right, but that didn’t matter. He followed me to the drop off point of a local hospital, got out of his car and begin to berate me and become more and more belligerent about it. If I did actually cut him off (and I may have), no accident had occurred and both of us and my wife (who I was dropping off for physical therapy), were not harmed. I tend to get a bit irritated when someone does that to me and than forget about it (as my pilot at the university said, “If you walk away from a landing, it was a good one!”). Things might have escalated, despite my apology, if the hospital security officer had not come out to see what the fuss was about. At that point he got in his car and left.
In addition, while we have always been at the mercy of our leaders, it has become even less predictable when some of our politicians don’t even follow agreed upon norms and you have no idea where they will go on issues vital to your survival.
Uncertainties that one knows and can be handled by yourself, or one, or a few trusted companions are liberating; uncertainties that are uncontrollable can be terrifying. The next year is a case in point. We will need all of our efforts to get through that one!